2113. Fracking Expands in Latin America, Threatening to Contaminate World's Third-Largest Aquifer

By Santiago Navarroand Renata Bessi, Truthout, December 6, 2015

Schlumberger employees work during an oil fracking process in Vaca Muerta in the Patagonian province of Neuquen, Argentina, September 20, 2013. Photo: Anibal Adrian Greco / The New York Times.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking - a method whereby hydrocarbons trapped within rocks are extracted - is expanding rapidly in Latin America. Fracking emits benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, which are considered by the World Health Organization to be carcinogenic and responsible for blood disorders and other immunological effects. Despite these adverse health effects, however, reserves have already been mapped out in Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

In Mexico, recently passed energy reform legislation promotes fracking as a means of extracting shale gas - and with the reform, the government has opened the oil industry up to the private sector. More than 1,000 wells using the technique are currently in operation in at least 11 of Mexico's 32 states. These fracking efforts are largely being carried out by North American companies such as Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes, among others.

"I didn't know anything about oil, but after our water started to get contaminated, we found out that more than 240 wells in our region were using that thing they call fracking," Mariana Rodríguez, from the community of Papantla, Veracruz, told Truthout. "Now all our water sources have become contaminated.”

According to Francisco Cravioto, a researcher from the Alianza Mexicana Contra el Fracking (Mexican Alliance Against Fracking) and a member of the Research and Analysis Centre of the Mexican civil organization FUNDAR, most of the communities facing contamination have very little knowledge about fracking. "The scale of the effects only becomes clear when they begin to experience them directly, as in the case of the northern region of Veracruz in Mexico, where at least 240 fracking wells are already in operation," Cravioto said.

Argentina, meanwhile, is considered the Latin American fracking capital because of the wells in the Neuquén Basin, a vast oil-producing region that covers the Neuquén Province and is home to the Vaca Muerta rock formation. This year in Argentina, fracking was used to drill into more than 1,000 shale gas reserves of compact sand and tight oil in slate or shale. According to International Energy Agency figures published in 2015, only the United States, Canada, and more recently Argentina and China produce large volumes of shale gas; the latter two countries are spearheading the development of shale extraction.

Polluted Waterways

Fracking takes a heavy toll on the environment wherever it is used. It produces large volumes of toxic and radioactive waste and dangerous air pollutants, and destabilizes the climate and local communities.

One of the greatest current fracking threats in South America is located in the Entre Ríos region of Argentina and the neighboring area of Uruguay in the Paraná Chaco, where the extraction of shale oil and shale gas is planned. According to Roberto Orchandio, an engineer and former oil industry employee in the United States and Argentina, contaminated water poses a serious danger. "In this region, the Guaraní Aquifer can be found, which is the third-largest in the world and holds 20 percent of South America's water, spanning an area that includes southern Brazil and part of Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay," Orchandio told Truthout. "So, we are concerned that if they have to drill into the aquifer, it will be contaminated and therefore destroyed. We have to weigh up if this is worthwhile.”

"Contaminated water is a huge problem. In some places it will be a disaster, like in the north of Mexico where there isn't any water and wasting it is illogical, because they are places where people won't be able to live," Orchandio said. "Every new well has a water leak rate of at least 6 percent, caused by a combination of poorly constructed foundations, pipeline accidents and corrosion.”

According to Argentina's Observatorio Petrolero Sur, an organization that advocates for sustainable energy consumption and production, less than half of the water used is recovered. This contaminated residual water is placed in water tanks, where exposure to the open air causes the chemical compounds to evaporate. The contaminated water is sometimes reinjected into other wells.

Observatorio Petrolero Sur has documented that within the first days or weeks of fracking in a region, a significant quantity of the water used in fracking returns to the surface, after being injected into rocks under great pressure and causing fracturing. 

Orchandio points out that large volumes of methane are also released. "Between 0.6 and 3.2 percent of an unconventional well's total production - be that one barrel or millions of barrels - is emitted as methane gas during the extraction process, along with the flowback fluid (the water mixed with the chemicals)," he told Truthout. "Methane has a greenhouse gas effect that is 25 times more potent than that of carbon dioxide.”

Cravioto describes the exploitation of the land for fracking as "territorial dispossession," noting its disproportionate impact on Latin America's Indigenous population. "In Mexico, Indigenous peoples and campesinos [peasant farmers] have been hardest hit," he said. "Their ancestral lands are being destroyed, those lands where their history, traditions and knowledge are stored. Entire ecosystems, and superficial and subterranean aquifers are being destroyed.”

Orchandio expressed fear that Latin America may follow in the footsteps of the United States, where fracking has rapidly spread, impacting human and environmental health. In the US, lawmakers have often worked to accommodate the plans of corporations - even in the face of considerable resistance by their constituents.

"I'm terrified by the thought that they might be able to do the same thing in Argentina that they did in Texas, where they banned fracking and then some time later banned the banning of fracking," Orchandio said. "No one will be able to live in places where they decide to extract these hydrocarbons because everything they leave behind is dead, and the same is true for Mexico or Brazil.”

Energy Independence

According to Orchandio, fracking was previously eschewed in Argentina due to its high costs and the environmental impacts. "Since the US made incursions into unconventional wells, in the year 2010 alone, there were a total of 2.5 million fracking wells across the world. Its irruption began in the US and centered on three states: Pennsylvania, Texas and in particular North Dakota, which is its greatest exponent and has become the American Saudi Arabia," he said.

Extracting unconventional oil is much more costly than extracting conventional crude oil, said economist Javier Martinez, and the recent fall in oil prices caused by increased supply is making it less profitable. "The allocation of titles - future oil purchase papers - is creating a speculative bubble that is going to burst," he told Truthout.

Orchandio, who is part of an Argentinian group that produced the book 20 Myths and Truths About Fracking, said that unconventional hydrocarbons only offer a temporary "fix" for waning fossil fuel supplies. He believes that wells have a life span of approximately six years, and that in the first year of operation up to 70 percent of their capacity can be extracted. "The productivity of these wells is too low. To maintain a production quota, you have to drill wells like crazy," he said. "To name one example, in North Dakota, they have to drill 1,500 wells per year. It's an abomination. In the US, all of the richest areas, the large pockets of hydrocarbons known as sweet spots, have already been found and fracked, and there aren't any more left.”

Orchandio added that hydrocarbon reserves are rapidly dwindling on a global scale as well. "The reserves shrink by between 4 percent and 5 percent per year, so that means they fall by approximately 12 percent in three years; this 12 percent or 13 percent of global production is the equivalent to what Saudi Arabia produces," he said. "This tells us that every three years we have to put a new Saudi Arabia into production, but there isn't another one. They are advancing rapidly to exploit more unconventional wells in other countries. A collapse of the technology matrix is approaching, and it is a national security issue for the US.”

Espionage and the Opening of New Hydrocarbon Wells

Numerous exposés in recent years have suggested that US-orchestrated espionage and actions taken in the name of "national security" have supported the spread of fracking across the globe. The documents leaked by the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, for example, confirmed that the NSA spied on the internal communications of Pemex in Mexico and Petrobras in Brazil, as well as other state-owned energy giants, seemingly with the aim of gaining leverage over their decision-making.

"With regards to the NSA espionage, it does not seem to be a simple operation to steal industrial secrets," said Dr. John Saxe-Fernández, author of the book Energy in Mexico: The Situation and the Alternatives. "It is espionage in order to identify the weak links in the chain of command, in order to know where to penetrate, who to negotiate with, who to promote, who to remove from the economic and political process.”

Meanwhile, this year the investigative news site DeSmogBlog revealed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped the Mexican government to weave a web of pretense in order to open up the energy sector - primarily involving conventional oil and gas, which are currently being extracted through fracking - to large multinational companies with the energy reform that was consolidated in 2014. According to the report, the Mexican government acquiesced to the demands of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and independent oil producers in the United States, among others, agreeing to let these energy firms capture the first nonconventional hydrocarbon wells that are currently being put up for tender in Mexico. Before the aforementioned energy reform, the sector was in state hands, with no possibility of opening it up to the private sector.

"The energy reform opened the door for national and multinational private companies," Cravioto said.

In Argentina, meanwhile, the country's leading oil-and-gas-producing company, YPF, has signed a secret agreement with Chevron to explore and exploit unconventional resources in the Vaca Muerta formation, with Chevron setting the rules. Some time later the executive branch gave its approval to this agreement through "Decree 929/13," which stirred debate and opposition among citizens due to the fact that YPF was recently nationalized and therefore its status as a public body means that it cannot hold secret negotiations.

After the agreement was signed in 2013, Argentinian Sen. Rubén Giustiniani asked to be given access to the complete text in order to divulge it to the public, Giustiniani claims. However, the Argentinian authorities turned down his request. Giustiniani was challenging the supposed existence of "secret clauses in the contract," including a hypothetical "commitment that forces the country to hand over an area that is the third-richest in unconventional oil and gas, for more than 35 years," and a "clause that ensures the payment of bonuses in perpetuity, even if Chevron pulls out of the deal.”

"The multinational companies that want to invest in Argentina seek guarantees for the price of extraction, and changes to legislation that are required to guarantee their investments," Orchandio said. "We don't know what direction the unconventional oil industry is heading in Argentina. Investors claim that they will come to Argentina only if the economic conditions improve; basically, they want us to pay them to take away the oil." On November 10, 2015, three years after Giustiniani's denunciation, Argentina's Supreme Court ordered that the clauses of the YPF-Chevron deal be made public.

Growing Resistance to Fracking in Latin America

In Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, opposition to fracking is growing.

In Brazil, in response to the tendering of blocks for the exploration and exploitation of shale over an area of 168,348 square kilometers, organizations, researchers and activists who belong to the No Fracking Brazil Coalition (Coesus) are keeping up constant protests and actions. In October 2015, in Paraná, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Acre and the Federal District, there were protests outside the offices of the fossil fuel companies that will participate in the Brazilian government's tendering of new blocks for fracking. The Brazilian protesters were joined by demonstrators in 28 countries, including Portugal, England and Spain, who demonstrated outside Brazilian embassies and consulates.

In Mexico, the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking has carried out a range of activities under the campaign banner of "Say no to fracking in Mexico!" One such activity was the production of a recent educational video, which included the participation of internationally renowned artists and provided information about what fracking entails. The alliance has been joined by Indigenous communities and campesinos who have protested and blocked roads in order to demand respect from the government for their ancestral lands.

In Argentina, several organizations have joined forces with the Movimiento Artístico-Cultural Contra el Fracking (Cultural and Artistic Movement Against Fracking) to publish a statement in which they appeal to "the precautionary principle" when it comes to fracking, stating, "Given the impacts it has on human health and the environment, our country must halt all ventures of this type, through a moratorium, i.e. through a suspension.”

The protests have continued to grow as more residents come to agree with Cravioto's assessment that the spread of fracking is a "war against humanity."

"We have to stop thinking that the market must solve our problems," Cravioto said. "We have to turn around and see those campesinos and Indigenous people who have shown us that another way of life exists, a way of life that is not about competition and destroying the environment in order to produce goods.”

2050. Not Colonialists, and Not Nice Either: A Response to Eduardo Gudynas

By By Estefanía Martínez, Verónica Morales, Carla Simbaña, Japhy Wilson, Nora Fernández, Thomas Purcell y Jeremy Rayner (CENEDET), Pensamiento Crítico, October 14, 2015

David Harvey

In an article recently published on various critical political websites, Eduardo Gudynas accuses David Harvey of “a nice colonialism”. According to Gudynas, the presence of Harvey in Latin America, and the “trendiness” of his Marxist theoretical framework is providing ideological support for certain governments in the region. As an example, Gudynas refers to CENEDET, the research team led by Harvey in Ecuador. In this article, we respond by emphasizing the utility of Harvey’s work for critical thinking and anti-capitalist struggles in Latin America, in contrast to Gudynas’s superficial analyses of “extractivism.”

One of the most important aspects of Harvey’s thought is the concept of accumulation by dispossession, which has been extremely useful for social movements that condemn and resist the dispossession and displacement that have been forced on peoples throughout Latin America. We, therefore, find it disturbing that this concept should provide the focus for Gudynas’s critique of Harvey’s work.

Perhaps Gudynas senses that he is no longer as ‘trendy’ as he once was, and has chosen to respond by attacking a theory that better serves resistance movements opposed to so-called “extractivism”? In his article he argues that some Latin American governments critique “global capitalism” as a convenient means of concealing the reproduction of capitalist social relations within their national territories. But his own critique of Harvey as a supposedly “kind colonialist” reproduces the same tendency in the field of academic thought, blaming external forces for avoiding internal changes, and rejecting a powerful theory because of its origin in the “North”, in order to hide the weaknesses of his own theoretical framework.

Rather than speculating further upon his motives, it is necessary to clarify some basic errors in Gudynas’s presentation of the theory of accumulation by dispossession. Gudynas refers to this theory as a simple reproduction of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation – of the separation of the peasantry from the land that forms the basis of capitalist social relations. Harvey certainly takes inspiration from Marx in this regard, but his argument is that these processes of dispossession are much more widespread than Marx indicated, and that they cannot be relegated to the past but continue to be active in contemporary capitalism.

According to Harvey, there is a dialectical relation (a concept that Gudynas is apparently unable to grasp) between the expanded reproduction of capital through the production and accumulation of surplus value in the exploitation of labor power – and accumulation by dispossession based on the outright theft of use values and their transformation into exchange values through the process of commodification.

In the context of capitalist crises (dynamics that Gudynas is equally incapable of comprehending), in which expanded reproduction slows and economic growth becomes negative, accumulation by dispossession assumes increasing importance for capital. According to Harvey, the intensification of accumulation by dispossession in the era of neoliberalism is an expression of the crisis of expanded reproduction at a global level, underway since the 1970s.

For Gudynas this focus on the global level is a profound weakness that makes Harvey irrelevant to the analysis of the concrete realities of Latin America. It seems that Gudynas does not understand the importance of examining the relation between geographical scales, which is fundamental to the critique of a capitalist system that operates simultaneously on the local and global levels. It is precisely here that the utility of the concept of accumulation by dispossession lies – it allows us, for example, to connect the violent dispossession of an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon with the over-accumulation of capital in China, instead of merely denouncing the event in abstract terms as a consequence of “extractivism”.

It turns out that descriptive and one-dimensional concepts such as “extractivism” and “neo-extractivism” are less useful than Marxian dialectics for critical thought and political action. It is for this reason, and not because of an alleged “mental colonialism”, that Latin American intellectuals and social movements are using Harvey’s concepts in place of Gudynas’s ideas.

In this respect, it is important to note that Gudynas’s own concept of extractivism is based on theories of “the Dutch disease” and “the resource curse”. These theories not only come from “the North” but are also derived from neoclassical economics; that is to say, from bourgeois thought. This is a far greater problem than a particular geographical origin when referring to a concept that has pretensions to being a useful tool in subaltern struggles.

Gudynas presents accumulation by dispossession as if it were the only thing that has crossed Harvey’s mind in his entire life. On the contrary, the concept is built on an immense theoretical base that offers a complex and coherent structure for thinking through the relationship between the accumulation of capital and the production and destruction of social space. Other examples of the application of his theoretical framework in Latin America include: rentier capitalism; infrastructural megaprojects; spatial utopias; entrepreneurial urbanism; the ecosystem of capital; and the demand for forms of property that prioritize use value over exchange value. (Gudynas claims that the concept of use value does not apply in Latin America, but indigenous communities dispossessed of their land and the possibility of reproducing their lives could offer him a very different perspective).

In this regard we invite readers to review the working papers that we have produced in our research center, which are based on heterodox readings of Marxism and combine the ideas of thinkers from Latin American and other latitudes in spaces not restricted to academia – such as our recent Summer Conference.

Our work demonstrates that Harvey’s framework provides a far more powerful critical approach than Gudynas’s ideas when it comes to thinking about actually-existing capitalism. In this regard, it is important to emphasize Gudynas’s complicity in trendy fantasies of a nice capitalism based on eco-tourism and “other knowledges,” by means of which he tries to defend “the rights of nature” without confronting the social relations of capital.

In the face of this impoverishment of critical thought, we propose a heterodox Marxism that is hostile to simplistic visions that propose false alternatives to the reality of capital. Against the nice capitalism and bourgeois colonialism of Eduardo Gudynas, we begin from Marx’s call for a “ruthless critique of everything that exists”.

2049. Friendly Colonialism and the ‘Harvey Fashion’

By Eduardo Gudynas, Entitle Blog, September 30, 2015

The Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas. Source: youtube.com

One of the most striking issues in the critiques of capitalism coming from Latin America are the continuous invocations of the English geographer David Harvey. References to the idea of “accumulation by dispossession” are repeated in hundreds of academic texts published by Latin Americans, and the author himself has been invited by the progressive governments of Ecuador and Bolivia.

Let us recall that Harvey proposed the idea of ” to replace Karl Marx’s concept of “original (or primitive) accumulation”. It refers to processes such as the commodification of land, expulsion of peasants, the transformation of labour into a commodity, colonialism or other aspects of the financialisation of economies.

They are attractive ideas which, without elaborating, many would share, and which in part explains the avalanche in citations of the term. Beyond that, however, I would like to explore other aspects of this “Harvey fashion” especially in South America, and the fact that the progressive governments of invite him and use his concepts to enhance their image as radicals. I am concerned about two issues.

The first is that this “fashion” ignores the rich history of Latin American reflections and takes us back into the hands of Northern thought. The second is that, while critiques such as Harvey’s can be shared, they are in any case insufficient for the Latin American reality. And it is precisely because of their incompleteness that progressive governments cite him and invite him.

A fashion

Let me explain, starting with the first point. The problem of accumulation by dispossession popularized by Harvey, as capitalist appropriation of natural resources or labour, in its basic ideas is not new. In Latin America we have a long and sad history of massive appropriation of our resources and of dispossession of indigenous people and peasants to enrich corporations and governments in other continents.

We also have many thinkers, activists and academics who, in their own way, in the last century at least have essentially supported these ideas. To give a few examples that come to mind, the reflections proposed decades ago by Mario Arrubla in Colombia, René Zavaleta Mercado in Bolivia, Ruy Mauro Marini from Brazil and Fernando Velasco Abad from Ecuador. Regardless of the positions one may have today regarding these and other authors, my point is that there is a very rich library of Latin Americans which is neglected time and again.

All this leads me to point out that, irrespective of whether one agrees or not with specific aspects of the theory of accumulation by dispossession, it would seem at times that this fashion is a new symptom of intellectual colonialism, whereby many prefer to quote an English author, leaving aside the recovery of our Latin American intellectual references. This may have to do with the academic obsession embraced in Latin America to cite texts in English or publications in Northern journals, as a demonstration of scientific expertise.

We are not facing a problem with Harvey, but rather a limitation in us Latin Americans. It is a friendly colonialism. It is friendly because the idea of a critique of global capitalism is attractive, but what goes unnoticed for this reason is that this is a form of colonialism, since we all draw upon, copy, repeat or seek the legitimation which irradiates from the “North”.

Four shortcomings

My second point does have to do with the emphasis of Harvey’s analysis. I insist that many of his theses can be shared, as they offer a valuable tool for understanding global capitalism. But the key issue to consider is whether these contributions are sufficient to understand what happens in Latin America, in our continent, and at this exact moment, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I find four important limitations.

The first one is that the approaches of the British geographer are primarily at a high level of abstraction, very focused on the dynamics of planetary capitalism. There are local and national examples, but there is no in-depth analysis of the forms of capitalist organisation typical of Latin America. His studies are so abstract that they allow a radical critique of capitalism as a global phenomenon but do not require analysing the details of national or Latin American contexts. This is not a minor limitation, since Latin America is inserted into globalization primarily through its extractive exports, and that kind of specificity does not appear clearly in Harvey. The geographer’s emphasis is on much larger scales. Couldn’t this be one of the reasons why he is cited and invited by progressive governments?

Because many progressives do just that, they challenge international capitalism but without taking on the contradictions internal to capitalism itself, or they attack imperialism but are almost silent on the internal colonialism they impose on peasants and indigenous peoples. Harvey’s texts fit perfectly with this duality, allowing global critiques (with the symbolic advantages of his Marxist language), without requiring much on national predicaments. This is a duality that has not gone unnoticed at conferences by the geographer in Quito or La Paz.

A second problem is the limited attention that Harvey pays to the ecological dimension. There is a no local Nature, rooted in territories, but rather an abstract consideration of the environment. This is not surprising because this author has had many problems in considering the environmental dimension (for instance, he distrusts ecological limits to economic growth). But if we want to carry out a Latin American critique of capitalism, we must necessarily incorporate an ecological dimension, involving the role of natural resources as well as concepts such as Pacha Mama, ayllu or life-territories. The distinctive ecological features of our region are not found anywhere else. In addition, its principal developmentalist strategies rest on a massive extraction of natural resources, and therefore any analysis will be incomplete if these aspects are not considered.

Again I wonder if this limitation is not one of the reasons why progressive governments endorse Harvey, since it offers the possibility of radical discourse against capitalism but without addressing local ecological destruction, territorialized in each country. It is a very attractive theoretical crutch for a government that wants to criticise, for example, the transnational nature of corporations, without saying anything about their role in generating negative social and environmental impacts associated with resource extraction in their own countries. (As a warning to the reader, it must be recognised that in one of his visits to Quito, Harvey symbolically signed a petition by Yasunidos to request a public consultation for oil exploitation in the area of Yasuni, in the Ecuadorian Amazon).

A third point concerns the fact that Harvey pays little to no attention to the indigenous world. His discourse is committed to popular sectors, such as in cities in the northern hemisphere, but the knowledge and visions of indigenous people are almost nonexistent. It is a viewpoint informed by western and modern knowledge. I cannot find a place for the Ecuadorian sumak kawsay or the Bolivian suma qamaña in Harvey’s texts. A key reason is that the ways of understanding the concept of value are very different in this author and in the framework of Buen Vivir. Once again this offers a good reason for progressive governments’ invitations because his ideas allow for a critique of capitalism while avoiding indigenous demands. International financialization and power asymmetries in relation to capital can be treated at length without having to consider indigenous voices. This is also an untenable position for the Latin American context.

My last point is that alternatives to capitalism are given very limited space in Harvey. He seems to fall into pessimism, in suggesting that the only solution would be to move from exchange value to use value. This is very similar to the discourse of various rulers who say, for example, that they must remain extractivist because there are no alternatives to global capitalism. It is quite understandable that Harvey would find in Latin American progressive governments a step towards the alternatives he seems to hope for, given that they certainly have positive aspects compared to the conservatism of the governments he has known for decades in Europe and the United States. But that’s not enough for Latin America, since we now have different references for comparison. Here again, I cannot help to note the convenience for rulers to cite Harvey, since the alternatives he proposes are so abstract and distant in time that they can be embraced while continuing to negotiate with contemporary capitalism.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the continent there are civic organisations and reflections which explore much more substantial alternatives, not concerned exclusively with use value. The clearest example is the rights of Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution, which start from a recognition of Nature as a subject, and therefore with its own values. Here there is a huge theoretical gap in Harvey’s gaze, which many pretend not to see. For in Harvey’s classical Marxism there is value only in humans and their work, and therefore there is no room for the rights of Nature.

Recover our own thinking

As it can be seen from this brief review, the work of Harvey is good to discuss global capitalism, but it does not require addressing social, environmental or economic impacts within each country, or a dialogue with indigenous knowledge. It is very useful to understand the workings of Wall Street, but it misses what happens in our Amazon. Is comfortable for academics and progressive governments to quote Harvey (and something analogous happens with Tony Negri), as it allows them to adopt anti-capitalist discourses while skipping prickly issues such as the contradictions of the capital within the country. It is a type of analysis which allows them to avoid almost all thorny issues regarding their development strategies.

As I said above, this is not a problem with these authors; rather, we face limitations and contradictions in the creation of a thought that is specifically Latin American. We, Latin Americans, must carry this discussion forward, and not wait for Harvey, Negri or others to stimulate it. This does not mean they should be ignored, since in their writings there are many worthy and useful lessons which can contribute to our own debate. But this task should essentially be in our hands.

The problem with the abuse of the “Harvey fashion” is that such theoretical positions are friendly, and thus it is difficult for us to recognise their limitations. It is a weakness which is exploited precisely by those who want to silence debates about national contradictions or those who abuse academic power in order to limit reflections. This trend also reinforces a colonialism which searches in the “academic north” legitimisation and truths. In this way we hold onto a colonialism that hinders our own thinking and the possibility of exploring substantive alternatives.

To break this colonial fence, a critical look from a Latin American standpoint must always be anchored in national and local circumstances (it must be grounded), it must pay attention to the environmental implications (it must be ecological), it must necessarily incorporate and dialogue with indigenous peoples (it must be intercultural), and it must illuminate ideas and practices around alternatives to development (it must break the fence of Modernity).

*Eduardo Gudynas is a researcher of the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES), Montevideo. Twitter: @EGudynas. This piece was republished with the author’s permission from rebelión.org. Translation by Diego Andreucci and Melissa García Lamarca.

1801. Leftwing Intellectual and Author Eduardo Galeano Is Dead at 74

By Alana Horowitz and Roque Planas, Huffington Post, April 13, 2015

Award-winning Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and leading leftwing intellectual has died, El Pais reported.

He was 74.

Galeano was best known for his 1971 anti-imperialist work, "Open Veins of Latin America," which details Latin America's exploitation at the hands of foreign powers, beginning with Spanish colonization five centuries ago and continuing to the present with the United States.

The book was banned for years by military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Galeano himself was arrested and exiled after a military coup lead by Juan Maria Bordaberry took over Uruguay in 1973.

“Open Veins” received renewed attention in 2009, when Venezuela's leftwing former President Hugo Chávez gave a copy to President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas and urged him to read it. Within hours of the event, the book soared to number 11 on Amazon.com’s best sellers list.

The book has been widely praised and has been translated into at least 20 languages. In 2009, the Guardian called Galeano "one of the most well-known and celebrated writers in Latin America.”

"We have a memory cut in pieces," he once told "Democracy Now. "And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow. But the human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.”

Though the book remains required reading for both fans and critics who strive to understand Latin America’s political development, in his later life Galeano became more self-critical of the work, describing it as an example of an exuberant youth writing without the benefit of a solid grounding in economics.

“‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation," Galeano said last year at a book fair in Brazil, according to The New York Times. “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it.”

Born in the capital of Montevideo in 1940, Galeano worked as a factory laborer, a cartoonist and a bank teller before emerging as a man of letters and a political thinker.

A prolific writer with more than 30 books under his belt, Galeano penned poetry and journalism as well as political analysis. One of his most famous works, “Soccer in Sun and Shadow,” is an ode to Latin America’s favorite sport.

“I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see,” Galeano once said, according to Argentine daily Clarín. “The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.”

Galeano had been diagnosed with cancer twice and, according to El Pais, was admitted to the hospital on Friday related to his illness.