Book Diplomacy?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s gift of a classic book favored by left-wing Latin American circles to an unsuspecting President Barack Obama at the V Summit of the Americas sparked controversy, humor and a sales blitz. 

After receiving Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Obama joked to reporters: “I thought it was one of Chávez’s books. I was going to give him one of mine.” A political cartoon in the Quito newspaper Hoy pictured a grinning Obama handing back to the Venezuelan leader one of the favorite tomes of the Latin American right: Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot by Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.

Despite the attempt at rapprochement through books, the region was still divided at the summit in Trinidad & Tobago, where Chávez refused to sign the final declaration, saying the document “does not reflect the necessities of the region.” The White House said Obama was unlikely to read Galeano’s book since it was in Spanish.

But it is too early to write off book diplomacy?

Chávez later told Venezuelan television, partly in jest, that he was going to tell the U.S. leader: “Obama let’s do a deal, let’s suggest books. I’ll give you one and you give me one.”

Galeano turned out to be the big winner. The Uruguayan author, whose Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone was being published in May in the United States, saw his nearly four-decade-old essay on European and U.S. exploitation of Latin America rise from the depths of Amazon listing (60,280) to No. 2 overnight.