Hugo Chavez's book "gift" to Obama

From Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the WSJ...

Just days after Hugo Chávez gave President Barack Obama a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America" in Trinidad last week, the English-language version of the book shot to the No. 2 slot on Amazon.com.

Americans seemed to be curious about Mr. Chávez's reading tastes. But in Latin America, "Open Veins" is a well-known rant by Uruguayan Marxist Eduardo Galeano. And it also has another distinction that Mr. Chávez may be less inclined to publicize: It is widely regarded in free-market circles as "the idiot's bible."

The book was tagged with that moniker in the 1996 best seller, "The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot." Penned by three Latin American journalists -- Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Alvaro Vargas Llosa -- the "manual" is a witty assault on the populist, militarist, caudillo mentality that has dominated the region for hundreds of years....

Open any page of Mr. Galeano's book and you will learn that Latins are losers. Not on their own account, mind you. It's all because Europe and the U.S. (the world's winners) buy raw materials from them and don't pay a fair price. In this way the haves of the world exploit the have-nots....

Mr. Galeano wasn't alone in promoting these ideas back in 1971 when the book came out....Its roots are in something called "structural economics"...[Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch] argued that Latin American poverty persisted because while rich countries could boost living standards through productivity gains, poor countries exporting only agricultural products and raw materials could not because of excess labor. Thus, they could not build the surplus capital they needed to move up the economic ladder.

These beliefs mixed well with fascism and Marxism. Politicians, whether from the extreme right or left, got behind Prebisch...The state took a prominent role...fueling corruption and hyperinflation and destroying any hope of rising living standards. By the late 1980s, with Latin America in crisis, Prebisch and his antitrade ideas were thoroughly discredited....

The Galeano book was not a present to Mr. Obama, though it was hyped as such. After all it was in Spanish, a language Mr. Obama does not read -- and Cuban and Venezuelan military intelligence surely would have advised Mr. Chávez of that fact. Its purpose was instead a way for the resentful Venezuelan to shove his anticapitalist, anti-American prejudices in Mr. Obama's face before rows of television cameras.

Yet, unwittingly, Mr. Chávez's gag gift served another purpose. If there has been any doubt about how he has run his oil-rich country into the ground during a decade of booming petroleum prices, the mystery is now solved. Mr. Galeano's book is Mr. Chávez's bible.