engage obama's old trade and community development i think a lot of the places would readily move off the drug trade. the province which produces the most opium in afghanistan ironically the fields are irrigated by this enormous irrigation project we did in the 1960's which is why they grow more opium than anyone else. but they're very nostalgic for the day the americans were there and helping them to grow melons and roses and they're all sorts of stuff and produce they can grow. it is very fertile farmland. but it will be expensive to try to move them onto alternative livelihoods'.

it is predicted it will cost $5 billion over five years to move afghan farmers on to alternative crops. that sounds like a big price tag and tell you consider rears spending $2 billion every month to run our military operations when you run the numbers that looks like a economical way out. anyone else? thank you. thank you very much [applause] . .

mr. galeano is into viewed by john dinges, a journalism professor at columbia and the author of a "the condor years: how pinochet and his allies brought terrorism to three continents". >> host: hello, we are here with a one of the authors that i have admired my whole life, eduardo galeano. eduardo galeano and was a born in uraguay. i mentioned to him just a minute ago that i have had his books in my head for decades. one of the reasons that i became

involved in latin america and latin american studies and writing as a journalist about what america was because of your works, so it is really a great pleasure for me to be here with you. >> guest: thank you. >> host: you have been in the states for a while now, how long have you been? >> guest: dennis. >> host: just arrived and you're going to new york. >> guest: i have to help my new baby called narrow, help him to walk. >> host: this is the book, "mirrors: stories of almost everyone". but, of course, i checked out the spanish title. >> guest: [speaking spanish] >> host: which is a little bit different, it means universal

history, almost. >> guest: almost because it to say universal history it sounds so solemn and arrogant. my intention was to write human diversity. without boundaries, without frontiers or from tears of time and frontiers of the maps and from tears at all. it was a mad adventure and the titles are more or less trying to say it is serious but no different. >> host: i think this last series when it is called a source of almost everyone because almost everyone is in this book and particularly people who are not usually mentioned in world history. >> guest: yes. >> host: was a couple examples of the kind of stories that you

are telling them to think characterizes what kind of a book this is. >> guest: yes, it is my intention was i never know if the results is at the level of the good intentions, but the good intention was to rescue the beauty of the terrestrial rainbow. we are much more than what we are told we are. of official history as related are passed, the media is manipulating prison history, so we are much more and then what we are told for instance the

invisible. they are known and most people who is doing history, making history and doesn't know they're doing it. women suppressed throughout history, just released to the place. black people coming indians, the south of the world, china, india -- i don't know. so many callers to be added to our rainbow which is much more beautiful than the other ones in the sky. >> host: well, i don't know if people will realize what kind of a book this is because this is not a history book. it is not a novel here it is not a work of nonfiction serious analysis. it is a book of stories and i

think the camera will catch this. this is how long the stories are. sometimes the stories are half a page. most of the time they are between one and one-half of pages. just for fun would you read the first or in the book just to give us an idea? >> guest: born of desire. life was a loan, known name, no memory. it had hands but no one to touch. in it had a tonga but no one to talk to. and life was one and one was known. and then desired in the view he spoke.

when i caught sight of its other big laugh and when they touch each other they left again. this mack i think that is a great example and, of course, it made me think of genesis. >> guest: they are part of real life of dreams and nightmares and part of daily life. >> host: is one of the most affectionate pieces in the hundreds of pieces. i thank you said there are six other jurors stories like this. >> guest: they finally survive after a process of capturing and

renouncing some of the intended short-story is in the first tertian. it was composed in a symphony and so the melodies would have a continued with them and some of the stories are so sad. the touch my back saying why, why? and my ugly? am i not beautiful enough? am i stupid? i want to be there, yes, of course but i can't. this is a problem with mosaics. because i love to write. there are some and a little

short pieces and i am in love with each one of them, but they must create a whole world and not some little pieces. >> host: you wrote another book that you call the, memory of fire. >> guest: three books this mack which is a trilogy. i read that in the 1980's and you do similar things. it is a more historical and more overtly historical, but the narrative structure is similar. you start out with a can of genesis. it is all about what america. >> guest: because we are america's in the south. >> host: absolutely.

>> guest: the language that's the press, but we are american also and the memory of fire i was trying to rescue the collective memory of the americas in three volumes. and this is much more of a massive project because the entire world. it is the entire world and history. >> host: i have been a fan of akaka but i think people a 60 to more with the great men american writers and i know this to be in the same sentence with the use is daunting. and those are author who are

household words in the united states and. in latin america you are certainly as well known as they are. and what is interesting is that all three of you are journalists and you have this kind of immediacy even though we started out with a peace and are going to read many more pieces, that was at the beginning of everything when man meets woman you talk about all the wars, all the cultures, the development of humankind. the scope is amazing and it is daunting. i thought we would do it a little bit of her biography before we go on with a book. of course, your name has been in the headlines in the united states because the president of venezuela chavez mad our president barack obama and as a gesture and i think a friendship

he gave barack obama this book. "the open veins of latin america". and he gave it to my understand was a spanish which, of course, is a little because obama doesn't read the spanish but i think the intention was to give him a book that if he were to read it to do it opened his eyes about latin america. there's a lot of discussion about that. what was your reaction when you heard that anecdote to that chavez had taken your book two barack obama? >> guest: a generous act, the young and sick, and obviously i was happy about it, but i was quite happy when i was walking in my walker in my neighborhood

and the seashore and everybody was saying we are selling so well. we are living in a world in which each one of us is becoming a commodity and you are sold, you are not sold. >> host: the bbc i think did that to because they mention that after he gave your book to barack obama it rose to number two in the amazon rankings. and i ejected because originally it was about 57,000. my books are in the 100 or 200,000. but they bounce up and down every day. i opened the spigot is around 17,000 so you can be a little bit more humble than you were a

or the attention was. >> guest: it is not important at all. and live there are some deals in life of which quantity and quality may be closer but not in literature. you may be very successful in the market to end in the quality of your books. definitely depends on it. the best selling and all the history of the spanish-language is by a novelist. he wrote something like 500 soap operas, books like soap operas and issues sold much more so it does not mean too much to me. >> host: i think it is significant because this book affected me so much when i was a

young man and it turns out to that i thought to your such a man of such stature and summers greater but it turns out we're almost the same age. >> does mack the book at the beginning when i tried to, perhaps as you reconsider it was not serious enough because at that time it was 1917. left-wing intellectuals used to believe in that if you're not boring then you are not serious. to be serious you should be boring and this is not a boring book and i suppose i don't know. it was powerful in mexico and a the first year it was a disaster

and it was a complete disaster, but later the military dictatorships became my marketing agency because they burned the book so if the book got a wide publicity thanks to this generous people in uniform. except in uruguay during five for six months "the open veins of latin america" could enter freely in the military prisons because the sons of god and that it was a textbook on anatomy. "the open veins of latin america", a textbook on madison and books of medicine or not for been. so after this short time they realized it was not exactly

this. >> host: apropos of it being burned i want to tell an anecdote that i told soon after it came out and my recollection is that i had the book with me when i was in chile in 1973 when the military coup overthrew the government of salvador and i stay on her for six years to write about the peanut shea dictatorship and that the book, your book i think this is a distinction would have been among the books that i had to burn in order to be able to say in chilly along with all of the books about the government, the democratically elected socialist president of chile who was overthrown and introduced 17 years of dictatorship by the right wing regime.

and that was an amazing experience that books before an american like me, the books would be burned and that in order to say in a country you had to perjure library cell i think that is a distinction that the books that were so good that they were threatening to it pinochet or the ones that had to be kept in the memory and not on my bookshelves and yours was among them. >> guest: is not an innocent book, it is clearly guilty and is an honor to be from the point of view of the pinochet or any one of them. >> host: you have been accused of being in pamphleteer and there is a lot of criticism as a

result which i was offended by because i know the book very well, i know your book for well and i know that it is compelling literature and you definitely make you're point of view very clear but i wanted to quote from a mexican writer to weigh in on this. he said you can say many things about this call the work of the american left, that it is manichean and that is extremist, that the stores or exaggerates, but nobody who reads it comes out unattractive in and the spanish word was indemnity. in so i think that is absolutely true that when you start reading this book for this book you are carried forward, you are outraged and you learn so much, but let's do the biography i was say we would do appear in your

born in uraguay. >> guest: yes. >> host: what time -- what happened at the time the military took over. you're the editor of a march up. i read him i first got involved in the land america. it was a left-wing newspaper, very famous at the time is my prayer perhaps the best and, yes, i was in jail for a brief time and then i went to argentina where i began and cultural magazine which was a very successful experience. it is not important but for it is our survival. and it was an emperor and

experience because usually cultural magazine consecrated an entirely to a cultural subjects. and at that time, so it sold 1,000 top base, the best of the cases. and we sold a 35,000, 35 or 40,000 which was approved, the evidence that we were in touch with people who were not in the usual clients like for this sort of thing. we were reaching people aside from the usual space where you find them in certain bookstores and so on and this was because we tried to prove in this magazine and that culture was not only the production of books or films or paintings were

plays, but all the expressions, collective expressions of identity and all the way some people find it to communicate with each other so for us and cultural was communion, it was a sort of canadian and that was why the same importance that we gave to some unknown pomes was also given to this city is and the letters from the prisons to the dreams of drivers in buses working 20, 15 or 20 hours some days so we were there, what did you dream when you can't sleep

in this exceptional moment when you can't sleep or we went to the factories to talk to the workers who never saw the sun because their time, their working time was from a 228 so the sun was invisible to them except on sundays. and all of this was culture. >> host: one years for you in argentina? >> guest: publishing almost a three-year four years, but then i was obliged. >> host: you're there in the years prior to the coup in argentina. >> guest: yes and some months after the coup, but i was obliged to leave uraguay because i didn't love to be in prison and i was obliged to leave

argentina because i did not like to be dead. death is boring and i was obliged to go out. two go away. the point which you can't distinguish the difference between courage and madness so i was living in such a way that i was going to be killed. >> host: well, i would like to bring in some background about that because one of my books is called the condor years about operation condor and it describes in great deal -- great detail the time in your living in argentine -- argentina and the amazing thing. there's absolutely no exaggeration in your feeling that it was madness to stay on in argentina at least 22,000 people were killed and the time by the military particularly

after the military coup happened in. operation condor was this operation to kill people from other countries who have sought exile. people like you and i wanted to ask you in most of the uruguay mansoor killed in this time by the military regime where actually killed in argentina. >> guest: it is like to say in your book, some sort of common market of that. something like this. latin-american countries have not been able to to read a real common market in the economy but in repression it was quite successful. >> host: you must have known hector bhutto perez to a prominent exiles from a

worldwide who were both murdered in this time in the 1976. >> guest: but i was the uraguay list and the argentine and list so staying there was undecided. >> host: so it was lucky for all of us that you did get out. >> guest: i don't know, but for me it was. >> host: because you continue to write. >> guest: yes, i went to spain, barcelona and there i wrote to the odd years of exile almost 1213 years. >> host: which ever books of yours are translated in english? >> guest: a lot of of them, but for instance the memory of fire was written in this time thanks to the military dictatorships that gave me time to write. it was a very, very difficult experience. all american history, all

american history in three volumes thru short stories telling it as flesh and bone and in something that you could touch. not ids but the human touch and of history when it is realized. >> host: in "mirrors" you read this tapestry of stories. there is a flow from one aspect, sometimes you cover a thousand years on a page. in other times you go back and forth a little bit. >> guest: but there is a continuity. like a river running, not below the line. how is it called an english? and subway is. >> host: and underground river. >> guest: underground river, like an underground river there

is some music uniting all of these different pieces that may turn into a mass of something, something crazy. but it is not. i hope it is not here and they are articulated because we have this river. >> host: and one almost inevitably leads to another. i have found that rating "mirrors" sometimes i would start in the middle just pick it up and sometimes reading and be carried foreign. then because i had to prepare for this i read all the way through, but there is always, it is almost like a push rather than a pull. i can't stop. i have to -- the thing i am reading now makes me read the next little story. how you create your stories? but i think what we should take a