perceived as “underdeveloped” regions but rather as areas that were striving to overcome the negative impact colonization and imperialism had in the subcontinent. This argument, later known as the Dependency theory, was presented by several authors but it was Galeano who shared the idea with the entire region. Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, winner of the 2013 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, said in an interview with BBC that what Galeano did in Open Veins had never been done before. "He gathered thousands of the most forgotten voices of Latin America," Poniatowska stated. Similarly, Jorge Volpi, another Mexican author, argued that Open Veins is one of the most influential texts written in Latin America during the twentieth-century and that "it opened the eyes of many young writers and political activists regarding the exploitation of this [Latin America] part of the world." Open Veins also was and continues to be part of the battle of ideas that initiated during the Cold War, by becoming a symbol of opposition to the intervention of the United States and other foreign powers in Latin American affairs. In the foreword to the 1997 edition, Isabel Allende stated that "after the military coup of 1973 I could not take much with me: some clothes, family pictures, a small bag of dirt from my garden, and two books: an old edition of the Odes by Pablo Neruda and the book with the yellow cover, Las venas abiertas de América Latina". Allende claims that the 1973 Military Coup against her uncle and leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende that gave rise to the long dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet could have been predicted based on Open Veins. The book, she argues, was proof that "no safe islands" existed in Latin America and that the government of Salvador Allende was “doomed from the beginning.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave United States President Barack Obama a Spanish copy of Open Veins of Latin America as a gift at the 5th Summit of the Americas in 2009, as an attempt to reinvigorate the argument of the book. As a result of this international exposure, the book's sales rose sharply—it was the 54,295th most popular book on Amazon.com before the event, but it became second a day later. In the opinion of El Espectador the core ideas of Open Veins have not been able to retake the central position they once had in Latin American discussions