Open Veins of Latin America
Galeano's sweeping account of 500 years of extraction (gold, silver, sugar, rubber, oil) from Latin America's peoples and lands by European and North American powers. Hugo Chavez famously gave a copy to Barack Obama at a summit. Banned by military dictatorships across Latin America. The central text of Latin American political consciousness.
Galeano disavowed this book himself in 2014: he lacked the economics training when he wrote it, he said, and could no longer stomach the prose. The dependency theory underneath has aged no better, every Latin American failure assigned to external villains, internal politics waved away. As history it is unreliable. As liturgy it works, which is part of the problem.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
