The trajectory of Open Veins is instructive, as Galeano’s work was received similarly to that of Coates: with liberal adulation and conservative skepticism. One of the main conservative criticisms of both Galeano and Coates’s work is that their presentations are unproductive calls to victimhood. Venezuelan columnist Ibsen Martínez characterized Galeano’s work as a “self-victimizing” that “debases the very theory of neocolonial dependence that Open Veins purports to sustain,” while The Federalist’s Rachel Lu accused Coates of depicting black Americans as “‘victims’ of history rather than its rightful inheritors.” To critics, this victim-focus led to Galeano and Coates’s failure to craft policy solutions to the cultural problems they highlighted.
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