Galeano wrote under his maternal family name as a young man, he briefly wrote for a Uruguayan socialist publication, El Sol, signing articles as 'Gius,' 'a pseudonym approximating the pronunciation in Spanish of his paternal surname Hughes.' Galeano's family belonged to the fallen Uruguayan aristocracy.Īfter completing two years of secondary school, Galeano went to work at age fourteen in various jobs, including messenger and fare collector.

His two family names were inherited from Welsh and Italian (from Genoa) great-grandfathers the other two were from Germany and Spain. 'I'm a writer,' the author once said of himself, 'obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.' Īuthor Isabel Allende, who said her copy of Galeano's book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, called Open Veins of Latin America 'a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling.' Life Įduardo Germán María Hughes Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 3 September 1940. Galeano's best-known works are Las venas abiertas de América Latina ( Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) and Memoria del fuego ( Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1982–6). Eduardo Hughes Galeano ( Spanish pronunciation: 3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015) was an Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, 'global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters' and 'a literary giant of the Latin American left'.

Galeano soccer