Christopher Columbus arrives in the Americas, kills 200 Indigenous people, and returns to Spain with gold and enslaved captives.

Spanish colonizers conquer Potosí and begin mining its silver, making the city the central export hub of the colonial economy.

The Spanish mita system forces Indians to mine silver using toxic mercury, causing mass death from poisoning and deadly fumes.

Mestizo chief Tupac Amaru leads the first major Indian uprising in Cuzco, declares Indians free, and is captured and tortured.

Portuguese gold hunters discover an enormous gold deposit in Brazil's Minas Gerais region, igniting a new wave of colonial extraction.

Enslaved people in Haiti burn sugar fields and drive the French colonial army back to France in a major slave rebellion.

US banks buy up failing Cuban sugar mills, cementing American economic control over Cuba's most important industry.

Fidel Castro leads the Cuban Revolution as a revolt against US economic domination and foreign control of the island's production.

Fidel Castro nationalizes petroleum in Cuba after Standard Oil refuses to refine oil purchased from a socialist country.

Chilean President Salvador Allende nationalizes copper, directly challenging US dominance over Chile's most valuable export resource.

Brazilian President Jânio Quadros signs a bill restoring Minas Gerais iron to national control and is subsequently removed from power.

British banks finance the Triple Alliance's devastating war against Paraguay, destroying the country's thriving independent economy.

The International Monetary Fund begins operations, creating a loan and debt system that deepens Latin American dependency on the US.

A US-backed military coup kills Chilean President Salvador Allende and installs the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Galeano concludes his book by calling for social revolution, urging Latin America's most marginalized people to overthrow their masters country by country.

Beginning with Christopher Columbus's arrival and the looting of gold and silver from Indigenous peoples, this pool traces the most significant milestones of Latin American economic exploitation. The silver mines of Potosí and the gold fields of Minas Gerais established brutal patterns of forced labor that devastated native and enslaved African populations alike. As sugar became the dominant colonial crop, foreign powers shifted from Spanish colonizers to US corporations dominating Cuba's economy through banking control. The Cuban Revolution marked a pivotal break from dependency, inspiring nationalizations of copper in Chile and iron in Brazil that directly threatened US corporate interests. These challenges to foreign control prompted US-backed military coups, most devastatingly the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Galeano closes by calling for a continent-wide revolution led by Latin America's most marginalized people.

The headline story of Latin American exploitation from Columbus to revolution.

Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, decimates its population, and melts stolen golden artifacts into bars.

Spain's colonial silver wealth flows to European creditors and bankers rather than developing Spain's own domestic economy.

African slaves are shipped to Brazil's Minas Gerais gold mines, where they are weighed, traded as currency, and worked to death.

The Methuen Treaty grants British merchants privileged access to Portuguese colonies, allowing England to profit from Brazilian gold taxation.

Sugar monoculture exhausts the soil of Northeast Brazil, turning it into one of the most underdeveloped regions in the Western hemisphere.

Enslaved Brazilians build the autonomous state of Palmares with diversified agriculture and their own governance until Portuguese forces defeat them.

Henry Wickham illegally smuggles Brazilian rubber tree seeds to Britain, enabling Southeast Asia to overtake Brazil in rubber production.

The assassination of Colombian Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán triggers a decade of brutal political violence killing over 180,000 people.

US filibusterer William Walker invades Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, installs himself as president, and reinstates slavery.

The New York stock market crash causes coffee and banana prices to collapse across Latin America, spreading mass unemployment and political instability.

Anastasio Somoza assassinates Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino and seizes control of Nicaragua for the next twenty years.

A US-backed military coup removes Guatemala's reformist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and returns seized land to the United Fruit Company.

Chile, Zambia, the Congo, and Peru discuss forming a united copper price-defense policy to resist Western corporate control of their exports.

US automotive corporations including Ford, Chrysler, and Volkswagen replace Brazilian-owned companies and take over a third of Brazilian manufacturing.

A small group of women and children launch a hunger strike against Bolivia's military dictatorship, galvanizing thousands and winning amnesty for prisoners.

This pool follows the essential secondary events shaping Latin America's history of exploitation and resistance, beginning with Hernán Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs and Spain's failure to convert colonial silver into domestic prosperity. The exhaustion of Brazil's soil through sugar monoculture and the creation of the autonomous slave state of Palmares illustrate both the environmental and human costs of colonial agriculture. From Henry Wickham's theft of rubber tree seeds to Colombia's decade of catastrophic political violence over coffee control, these events reveal how Latin American economies were consistently undermined by forces within and beyond their borders. The rise of dictators like Somoza and the US-backed coup against Guatemala's reformist President Arbenz demonstrate how political violence served to protect foreign corporate interests across Central America. Ultimately, US automotive corporations' takeover of Brazilian manufacturing and a courageous Bolivian hunger strike bookend the range of corporate encroachment and grassroots resistance that defines the region's modern history.

The supporting cast of colonial violence, resistance, and corporate takeover.

Galeano frames Latin America as the 'region of open veins,' a body where all resources drain outward to the US and Europe.

Francisco Pizarro strangles Incan Emperor Atahualpa and returns to Spain with the looted treasure of the Incan Empire.

Spain grants Indian mine workers legal protections but explicitly reserves the right to suspend them if silver production declines.

British colonial forces take over Havana and introduce sugar plantations and slave labor, transforming Cuba's rural agricultural economy.

Britain dominates the transatlantic slave trade by manufacturing textiles and weapons to exchange with African chiefs for enslaved captives.

The discovery that rubber can be used in vehicle tires drives a massive demand for Brazilian rubber exports and Amazon labor.

Uruguayan agrarian leader José Artigas redistributes land to marginalized people and challenges foreign imports, but is forced into exile and his reforms reversed.

Emiliano Zapata's agrarian army overthrows Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz and issues the Plan de Ayala demanding land redistribution to peasants.

Chile defeats Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, delivering control of the region's nitrate deposits to British interests.

Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda attempts to nationalize nitrate fields and is removed after British-funded opposition finances a civil war against him.

A German chemist synthesizes nitrate from air, ending Chilean export dominance and turning the country's mining villages into ghost towns.

Argentina's dependence on British textiles becomes so extreme that the country stops domestic production and imports even its sidewalk stones from Britain.

The Latin American Free Trade Area agreement fails to create regional economic independence, instead channeling profits to US and European multinationals.

Latin American governments use state terrorism, disappearing and killing dissenters, to paralyze their populations with fear and suppress political opposition.

Galeano declares that memory is subversive and urges Latin American people to reclaim their history as the foundation for revolution.

This pool opens with Galeano's foundational metaphor of Latin America as a body bleeding resources outward, before tracing the pivotal moments that reveal how exploitation was designed into the colonial system itself. From Pizarro's murder of the Incan Emperor to Spain's deliberately hollow legal protections for mine workers, the early chapters expose how violence and false reform were tools of the same colonial hand. Britain's rise through the slave trade and Cuba's transformation by British-introduced sugar demonstrate how each new resource created fresh systems of human degradation. Attempted reforms by Artigas in Uruguay, Zapata in Mexico, Balmaceda in Chile, and a German chemist's accidental destruction of Chile's nitrate economy each reveal how structural change was methodically suppressed or rendered obsolete by outside forces. The pool closes with the Latin American Free Trade Area's failure to deliver regional independence, the spread of state terrorism, and Galeano's final declaration that reclaiming historical memory is the first act of revolution.

The key revelations and turning points that expose the mechanics of colonial exploitation.