Kathy’s Reviews > Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent > Status Update

I feel like the chapter on “the contemporary structure of plunder” is not as clear as it could be.

“Friedrich List, father of the German customs union, once observed that free trade was Britain’s chief export. Nothing roused such British anger as protectionism, and they sometimes gave vent to it in violent language, as during the Opium War against China.”

I don’t think I truly understood the concept of “agricultural reform” in L.Am. (referenced and discussed in The Shock Doctrine, Empire’s Workshop, and Hope in the Dark) until reading the latter portion of chapter 2.

if I hadn’t just read the Grapes of Wrath and This Has Always Been A War, I don’t think I would viscerally understand the plight of Latin American agricultural workers as described in this.

Author has a bizarre combination perspectives. He has compassion for the exterminated, enslaved, and oppressed Indigenous peoples of Latin America and tells their story; he also frequently refers to not-yet-exploited deep Amazonia/montane tribes as “barbarous”, “savage”, and having “no organized civilization”.