" The most heartening response came not from the book pages in the press
but from real incidents in the streets. The girl who was quietly reading Open
Veins to her companion in a bus in Bogotá, and finally stood up and read it
aloud to all the passengers. The woman who fled from Santiago in the days of
the Chilean bloodbath with this book wrapped inside her baby's diapers. The
student who went from one bookstore to another for a week in Buenos Aires's
Calle Corrientes, reading bits of it in each store because he hadn't the money to
buy it.
And the most favorable reviews came not from any prestigious critic but
from the military dictatorships that praised the book by banning it. For example,
Open Veins is unobtainable either in my country, Uruguay, or in Chile; in
Argentina the authorities denounced it on TV and in the press as a corrupter of
youth, As Blas de Otero remarked, "They don't let people see what I write
because I write what I see. "

― Eduardo Galeano , Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent