Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and leading leftwing intellectual has died, 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.

“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.”

Born in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo in 1940, Galeano worked as a factory labourer, a cartoonist and a bank teller before arriving on the literary scene as a man of letters and a  thinker.

A productive writer with more than 30 books, Galeano wrote poetry as well as political analysis. One of his most well known works, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, is an ode to Latin America’s favorite sport.

“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.”

Members of the Partido Humanista in South America informed Pressenza and wish to give credence to his life and work. Eduardo Galeano supported the World March for Peace and Nonviolence, promoted by World Without Wars and Violence, that travelled the world between October 2009 and January 2010.

Extracts taken from the Huffington Post, for the original article go to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/eduardo-galeano-dead-dies_n_7054062.html