I personally think that some version of this was a good idea, given the general treatment of Indians and peasants by the Church in South America for hundreds of years. It's a story of wholesale genocide justified by the prayerful murmurings of self-serving Catholic priests, beginning with those who accompanied Hernan Cortes. Someone like Bartolomé De Las Casas, a Spaniard who was the first bishop of Oaxaca, Mexico, and who defended the rights of the Indians before the Spanish court, was a distinct rarity. Most other priests victimized the Indians in the same way the secular conquistadores did, though with the direct approval of the Christian God, which made it even more shameful a history.

What made The War of The Cristeros so strange was that it was fought by Mexican Catholic peasants in God's name against Calles's government, in order to maintain the ascendancy of established religion in Mexican society. That the majority of Mexican Church fathers stood to the side, caring little for the peasants, seems to have been lost on the peasants themselves. Thousands of them died horribly in this war.

The rage of The Cristeros had been enflamed by official Church umbrage at government policies, and a few years later The Cristeros were hung out to dry when that official Church colluded with the government in the agreement to end the war. The peasants were used, they died in droves and then they were abandoned.

Juan Rulfo himself went on to become a major Mexican literary figure, the man who wrote the novel Pedro Paramo, which is frequently cited as central to the South American "Boom" of such later writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa and so many others. The spectral figures that Galeano writes about in the passage above are very like those that Rulfo himself describes in his story of a man's search through a heat-blasted Mexican countryside for the truth about his father Pedro Paramo.

The Memory of Fire trilogy is made up of hundreds of such stories, and each gives a view of history that would almost never be found in the usual kinds of history books. Galeano was trained as a journalist, but it is my belief that he is a kind of inspired novelist/poet who, as it happens, found the vein for his work in the themes of history.

You may need a more traditionally written history of South America to make complete sense of all the people of whom Galeano writes. But I think everything you'll need can actually be found in the amazingly encyclopedic bibliography that Galeano provides. Each chapter is punctuated with references to the books that he's read, in which he's found the stories he tells. Taken together, the books in his bibliography form a complete guide to the history of every country in The Americas, or at least of Central and South America.

But Galeano's own interpretation of all this is, for me, the most emotionally truthful take on the history of South America that's ever been written.