Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

April 23, 2009 By Fausta

Alvaro on the gift

When I heard that Chavez had gifted Obama the Marxists’ loser-game screed, The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (go ahead, look for it if you want it), all I could think of was Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s book, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot which was first published in Spanish, Manual Del Perfecto Idiota Latinamericano, where Vargas Llosa, along with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Carlos Alberto Montaner debunked much of the nonsense that passes for political analysis in Latin America.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who thought about it. Mary O’Grady was saying,

Too bad Mr. Obama didn’t have a copy of the late 1990s bestseller “The Perfect Latin American Idiot” as a gift for Mr. Chávez.

As it turns out, Alvaro wrote the chapter dealing with Galeano’s book, and now Alvaro updates his message:

Regift, Please!
What to make of the book that Chavez gave Obama?
(via Ada)

The author claims that relations between Latin America and rich countries have been so pernicious that “everything … has always been transmuted into European–and later United States–capital.” Actually, for years that relationship has transmuted into the exact opposite: Latin American capital. In the last seven years alone, Latin America has benefited from $300 billion in net capital flows. In other words, a lot more capital came in than went out.

The book rails against the international division of labor, in which “some countries specialize in winning and others in losing.” That division of labor in the Western Hemisphere has not changed–Latin American countries still export commodities–and yet in the last six years, poverty in the region has been reduced to about one-third of the population, from just under half. This means that 40 million were lifted out of that hideous condition. Not to mention the 400 million pulled out of poverty in other “losing” nations worldwide in the last couple of decades.

The author pontificates that “raw materials and food are destined for rich countries that benefit more from consuming them more than Latin America does from producing them.” Sorry, amigo, but the story of this decade is that Latin America has made a killing sending exports abroad–the region has had a current account surplus for many years. Rich countries are so annoyed with all the things poor countries are exporting to them that they are asking their governments to “protect” them in the name of fair trade. The “buy American” clause in the fiscal stimulus package approved by Congress a few weeks ago is a case in point. The U.S. had a trade deficit of more than $800 billion last year. The poor, if I may echo Galeano’s hemophilic language, are sucking the veins of the rich.

The book claims that for years “the endless chain of dependency has been endlessly extended.” The story now is that the rich depend on the poor. That is why the Chinese have $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds! The book’s jeremiad goes on to say that “the well-being of our dominant classes … is the curse of our multitudes condemned to exist as beasts of burden.” One of the few countries that exemplifies that curse is the author’s beloved Cuba, where a worker cannot be paid directly by a foreign company employing him or her; the money goes to the government, which in turn pays the worker one-tenth of the salary–in nonconvertible local currency.

Galeano’s mathematics are hugely entertaining. He states that the average income of U.S. citizens is “seven times that of a Latin American and grows 10 times faster.” The gap has actually shrank, dear comrade. Many “poor” countries in modern times have seen their income gap with the Unites States narrow dramatically. Thailand and Indonesia have seen theirs cut almost by half in three decades.

The book’s Malthusian predictions invite no less compassion than its economic forecasts. Overpopulation, Galeano maintains, will mean that “in the year 2000 there will be 650 million Latin Americans,” the implication being that the region will starve. In 2000, the region’s population was 30 percent smaller than the author predicted.

Go read every word.

Someone send Pres. Obama the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, please.

UPDATE
Free Marketeros rip to shreds the Galeano book.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Communism, Hugo Chavez Tagged With: Add new tag, Fausta's blog, Summit of the Americas, The Open Veins of Latin America

Comments

  1. Robert says

    April 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    It’s unfair to criticize this book after almost 40 years of changes in South America. At the same time, you must appreciate that Chavez only used this book for some effective propaganda. Look at all the news it’s garnished!

  2. Fausta says

    April 23, 2009 at 3:56 pm

    Yes, it was a propaganda move.
    Not unfair at all to criticize the book. That’s what free debate is about.

  3. Dino says

    April 28, 2009 at 10:33 pm

    The Washington Times

    Tuesday, April 28, 2009
    Obama fields press, gifts in first 100 days

    Stephen Dinan (Contact)

    Though its own author has lamented it as one-dimensional, the book Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama at the recent Summit of the Americas is rite-of-passage reading for Latin American youths and a favorite of Marxist historians.

    Eduardo Galeano, author of “Las venas abiertas de America Latina,” published in English as “Open Veins of Latin America,” takes swipes at imperialist European and American interference but doesn’t spare leftist leaders, arguing that they often fail just as badly as the right wing.

    “Galeano is like the preacher who feels that it’s his responsibility to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We may not like the prophet’s message, but if it’s true, we recognize that we need to hear it,” said William Hamilton, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who uses the book in his class “Voices From Latin America: Why Don’t They Like Us?”

    Mr. Chavez seemed to have carefully choreographed his performance in giving the book to Mr. Obama. He waited until after the U.S. president had finished speaking to a multilateral meeting of South American leaders but before reporters had been ushered out of the room, giving him an audience.

    The White House initially dismissed the gesture. A senior administration official told reporters it was a publicity stunt, another in a long line of efforts by Mr. Chavez to commandeer attention. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said he doubted Mr. Obama would be reading the book because the version Mr. Chavez presented was in Spanish.

    However, the president himself was more gracious: “I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book — I’m a reader.”

    Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of the Progressive, which runs a regular column by Mr. Galeano, said the book “was a very fitting gift” and that Mr. Chavez has played literary agent before, in his 2006 speech to the United Nations, when he called attention to leftist U.S. author Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.”

    “This isn’t the first time Chavez has introduced the world to a leftist critique of U.S. foreign policy,” Mr. Rothschild said. “This is in keeping with Hugo Chavez’s syllabus for grown-ups.”

    Mr. Hamilton said the gift to Mr. Obama was not a publicity stunt but more likely a genuine gesture.

    “Chavez as well as people everywhere are impressed with Obama and surprised we elected him. And they’re giving us a chance to renew our deepest values and redeem our image as a nation,” he said.

    Mr. Hamilton lived in Latin America with his wife and children for a decade and said they were given the book when they first got to Buenos Aires.

    “Reading Galeano is a rite of passage for young people all over Latin American, year after year,” he said. “During the military dictatorships of the 1970s and early 1980s, Galeano’s books were banned in schools but still widely read. Friends told me that they buried their copies in their backyards so that their families wouldn’t get in trouble with the military. I’ve traveled widely in Latin America, and I have met few people who have not read Galeano’s ‘Venas abiertas de America Latina.’ Not only have they read it cover to cover, they are always willing to talk about it.”

    After Mr. Chavez’s summit gesture, “Open Veins” skyrocketed in sales, jumping from No. 54,295 on the Amazon.com listing on the Saturday morning when Mr. Chavez handed it to Mr. Obama to No. 2 by Sunday.

    The presidential bump was short-lived, however. By this past weekend, the book had dropped precipitously, falling to No. 22 by Sunday morning and to No. 42 by Monday morning — sandwiched between “The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep It Off” and “Eat This, Not That! Thousands of Simple Food Swaps that Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds — or More!”

    Short on self-help advice, Mr. Galeano’s book — whose full title is “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” — is a deep history looking at U.S. and European powers’ machinations to get their hands on every resource from gold to sugar to oil.

    It’s long on blame.

    “The Congressional Record of the United States is replete with irrefutable evidence of interventions in Latin America. Guilt-ridden consciences purge themselves in the imperial confessionals,” Mr. Galeano writes.

    Mr. Galeano didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment, but in an article on the book, the New Yorker magazine said that in later years the author described his work as one-dimensional.

    It’s not surprising the book, published in 1971 and updated seven years later, has been re-evaluated over the past week, with dozens of new reviews being added to online booksellers’ Web sites. Being seen in two presidents’ hands will do that.

    After Mr. Obama’s election, Mr. Galeano wrote a column laying out what he hoped for from the incoming president. The unsurprising list ranged from halting construction of a fence on the Mexican border and joining the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gases to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and ending the embargo on Cuba.

    However, Mr. Galeano closed with a personal challenge to the new president: “Will Obama, the first black president of the United States, realize the dream of Martin Luther King, or the nightmare of Condoleezza Rice? This White House, which is now his house, was built with the labor of black slaves. Let’s hope he never forgets that.”

    In a recent interview, though, Mr. Galeano sounded nearly as disappointed in leaders such as Mr. Chavez. Without naming names, the writer harshly evaluated some of the leftist leaders who have emerged in the hemisphere.

    “To give you a very current example, there are parties who come into the government promising a program of the left and wind up repeating what the right wing did,” he said in an interview with Jorge Majfud, translated and printed in Monthly Review. “History grows bored, and democracy is discredited, when we are invited to choose between one and the same.”

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