The following are excerpts from the interview with Eduardo Galeano, as published in The Progressive, July 1999. Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, journalist, historian and social critic. He is the author of several acclaimed works, including Open Veins of Latin America, and was recently awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. Presented here without permission.

Who makes the weapons?

Eduardo Galeano

If the consumption society imposes its values all over the world, then the planet would disappear. We cannot afford it. We don’t have enough air, earth, or water to pay the price for such a disaster.

The model imposed on all of Latin America is not Amsterdam or Florence or Bologna...Today, cities are places where machines encounter machines. We humans have become intruders. And what do we want to become like? Los Angeles, a city in which cars own much more space than people. This is an impossible ream. We cannot become them. If the entire world has the same quantity of cars as the U.S. with its one-person, one-car, then the planet will explode. We have poisoned the air, poisoned the earth, poisoned the waters, poisoned the human souls. Everything is poisoned.

When a Latin American president in his speech says, 'We are becoming a part of the First World,' in the first place he’s lying. Second, this is practically impossible. And in the third place, he should be in jail because this is an incitement to crime. If you say, 'I want Montevideo to become Los Angeles,' you are inviting the destruction of Montevideo...

I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It’s quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S...

In this world, you have injustice on such a broad scale. The difference, the gap, between rich and poor people in material terms has been multiplied in these thirty years since I wrote Open Veins [of Latin America]. The last UN report says that in 1999, 225 persons own a fortune equivalent to the total amount of what half of humanity earns. It’s a very unjust distribution of bread and fishes...

The huge U.S. military budget is preposterous. Who is the enemy? It’s like a Western movie. You need a bad guy. If he doesn’t exist, then you need to invent him. In the States you need villains. Saddam Hussein this morning, Milosevic this afternoon. But you need a bad guy. What a poor God without a Satan to fight against!...

One of the big paradoxes in this upside-down world is that the five countries empowered to take care of peace are also the five biggest producers of arms. Almost half of the total weapons in the world are made by the United States, followed by Great Britain, France, Russia, and China. These are the countries with the right of veto in the UN Security Council. The UN was born to bring peace to the world, but the five countries with this sacred, beautiful, poetic mission of peace are also the ones conducting the business of war...

Every time I hear about wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Africa, and anywhere else, I always ask the same question... ‘who is selling the arms?’ ...the five countries that are taking care of peace. It’s terrible, but it’s a reality...

We are part of nature, so any crime committed against nature is a crime committed against humanity. But I don’t share the view that were committing suicide because I’m not committing suicide. It’s just 20 percent of the human population wasting natural resources and poisoning the Earth; 80 percent are suffering the consequences...

We should learn from Indian culture the deep sense of communion. This is something for God to include in the Ten Commandments. It would be the Eleventh Commandment: ‘You should love nature, to which you belong.’