'Open Veins Of Latin America' By Eduardo Galeano

Improved Essays
In the second chapter of, “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Eduardo Galeano had a lot of information in it. The chapter also had a ton of themes going on, but the three most important themes in my opinion that I thought was represented in the chapter repeatedly was slaves and cheap workers such as peasants. Another theme was the devastations that occurred throughout Latin America. The last theme that I will summarize was the theme of violence that was occurring in Latin America at that time. In this chapter, there is the mentioning of slaves and hiring peasants for cheap labor multiple times. In fact, in the first couple of pages of the chapter it talks about latifundio which “… has been sufficiently mechanized to …show more content…
One of the first crisis or devastation that occurred in the chapter was the fact that sugar had destroyed the Northeast and how everything was altered because of it. It later began talking about how the cost in food had spiked up and many families were having a hard time making money to support the family that parents began to sell their kid into prostitution to make so money. A big devastation mentioned in the chapter was how due to all the production going on many of the lands and soil of the lands were ruined making it very difficult for these countries to even produce anything. Also, began to talk about tobacco production and how that started to decrease and how prices on everything began to increase. It also mentioned how the once beautiful land of Cuba was ruined because of sugarcane. The chapter then went on to discuss how basically everything went wrong with sugar production and the cost of it decreasing and with sugarmills and banks going bankrupt. It ended up talking about how the best thing that could have happened to producing countries were natural

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