The Open Veins of Latin America, Part One

The forced exportation of gold, silver, sugar, coffee, and rubber

     In 2009 at the Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America to U.S. President Barack Obama, saying to the new American president that the book tells the Latin American story.  Obama looked at the book for a second and placed it on a table, thus casting aside the opportunity to have a brief discussion about the book with Chávez.  In his pre-election autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s chapter on his boyhood years in Indonesia demonstrates that he has the capacity to understand, at least when aided by personal experiences, that U.S. policies promote the underdevelopment of Third World nations; but the book also demonstrates Obama’s capacity to compartmentalize the Third World, and to focus his thought on issues central to U.S. public discourse.  The subsequent policies of the Obama administration indicate that Obama either did not read Galeano; or placed it in a compartment of his mind, inaccessib…