Politics & Power Quote by Eduardo Galeano

Astonishment is doing tactical work here: Galeano isn t merely reporting a travel impression, he s staging a moral indictment in the polite costume of surprise. The line reads like a journalist s field note, but its real target is structural, not personal. Ignorance becomes a civic condition produced by the U.S. as a system, not a quirk of a few incurious people. By saying "each time", he turns it into a pattern, suggesting that even as U.S. power expands, its public imagination stays provincially fenced in.

The phrase "high percentage" is blunt on purpose. It refuses the comforting idea that the problem is confined to extremists or the poorly educated. Galeano s larger project, especially in The Open Veins of Latin America, is to expose how empire depends on distance: extraction abroad paired with amnesia at home. If Americans don t know Latin America, they also don t have to feel implicated in coups, debt regimes, or resource flows that enriched the North and scarred the South. "Blind and deaf" is not just insult; it s sensory language that frames ignorance as a kind of disability manufactured by media, schooling, and national myth.

Context matters: Galeano wrote from a continent repeatedly reshaped by U.S. intervention during the Cold War and after. From that vantage point, U.S. insularity isn t innocence; it s a feature that protects consent. The sting of "frontiers" lands because it flips the border story: the U.S. imagines itself as the world s reference point, while Galeano casts it as a sealed room, powerful enough to rearrange its neighbors yet uninterested in learning their names.