Eyes Wide Open writer Eduardo Galeano take us on a journey through today’s Latin America. After 500 years of exploitation and repression, Latin America is at a turning point in its history: a series of socialist leaders has come to power.
Can they satisfy their peoples’ hunger for change?
His search takes him from the soybean plantations of the Brazilian Amazon and the tin mines of Bolivia to the deep jungles of Ecuador. Arijon, shows how the current crop of leftist leaders in these countries are attempting to resist the squandering of natural resources by large, international companies. The principal culprits he identifies are the neoliberal ideology and the ensuing wave of privatizations. Arijon's politically committed film allows the local populations to speak for themselves, interspersing this with archive footage of speeches by the likes of Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Lula da Silva (Brazil), and Evo Morales (Bolivia). Galeano himself also talks -- sometimes in poetic language -- about how the rise of socialist governments in the early 21st century is benefitting Latin America, and what more can be done