Riccarda Flemmer, Giga German Institute Of Global And Area Studies, Hamburg:
The Americas, and especially South America, have been a source of natural resources ever since colonial times. Eduardo Galeano’s book The Open Veins of Latin America (Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina), first published in 1971, remains a powerful metaphor for depicting the economic exploitation of the subcontinent by European countries and later the United States. In recent decades, however, global and domestic conditions of access to these resources have changed.