Chavez Gift to Obama

UPDATE, April 20, 2009: Obama Calls Chavez Gift a 'Nice Gesture'

Obama did not make note that the book offered by Chavez, "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent," by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, blames foreign interests like the United States for exploiting Latin America for centuries.

"It was a nice gesture to give me a book. I am a reader," Obama said during a solo press conference at the end of a the summit held in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago

"We had this debate throughout the campaign. I mean the whole notion was somehow that if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us that would show weakness. And the American people didn't buy it and there's a reason they didn't buy it -- because it didn't make sense," Obama said.

"NICE gesture"?

I wouldn't call it that.
_________________

Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a book that attacks the United States for exploiting Latin America.

How thoughtful! It will be a great source of things Obama can use in his apologies for the sins of the U.S.

From ABC News:

At President Obama's meeting with the heads of South American countries this morning, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stood, walked over to him, and presented him with a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.

Obama politely posed for a photograph with Chavez, shook his hand, and accepted the gift.

The book, first published in Spanish in 1971, offers a critique of the consequences of 500 years of European and U.S. colonization of Latin America.

"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing," the book begins. "Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role."

Galeano writes that while the era of "lodes of gold" and "mountains of silver" has passed, "our region still works as a menial laborer. It continues to exist at the service of others' needs, as a source of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them."

At another point in the book, Galeano writes: "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."

The book also criticizes the U.S. for "spreading and imposing family planning. ... In Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill future guerillas in the womb that in the mountains or the streets."

...The copy of the book Chavez gave Obama appears to be in Spanish, a language Obama does not speak.

At the start of the first plenary session at the Summit of the Americas later this morning, President Obama was asked what he thought of Chavez’s gift.

“You know, I thought it was one of Chavez’s books," Obama answered. "I was going to give him one of mine.”

What? No iPod?

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