Getting past the fact that it was Hugo Chavez …

At the Summit of the Americas last week, the smiling encounters between President Barack Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had pundits speculating about the new administration’s approach to Latin America, in particular to the controversial, America-is-the-Devil President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (and to his shunned political ally Raúl Castro of Cuba).

In a gesture caught on camera and analyzed ad infinitum , Hugo Chavez gave President Obama a book entitled Open Veins of Latin America, a critique of Imperialist American involvement in Latin America written in1970 (revised 1978)  by the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano.  The book presents the history of Latin America from its initial colonization and exploitation by its Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the 1500’s through the 20th century, in which it argues that the very structure of the world economic system (organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank) encourages the prosperity of the United States and the continued exploitation of Latin America.  The IMF, for instance, is said to have preferentially given loans to Latin America’s right-wing military dictatorships of the 1970’s and ‘80’s, whose economic policies were beneficial to U.S. and European corporations, despite these regimes’ flagrant abuse of human rights.

That Hugo Chavez is the giver of this well-reasoned and influential book certainly adds another layer to its interpretation, Chavez himself having positioned himself as something of a radical ideologue (albeit a radical ideologue of the left).  However, thinking of Chavez’s rise to power in light of the historical context laid out in Galeano’s book certainly should be a crucial aspect of the Obama administration’s consideration of diplomatic relations with Latin America, the majority of whose current governments have been deeply influenced by theories like Galeano’s.  Reading it certainly won’t hurt the thousands of people who have obtained a copy in the wake of Chavez’s gesture.