Word: ch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Martí's Our America? Eh. How about everything by Gabriel García Márquez? (Although I had to admit that was to impress women.) He shook his head and handed me Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America - the same book Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez made a show of giving Barack Obama on Saturday before Obama's meeting with South American leaders at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad. (See TIME's photos of Carnival in Trinidad...
...Read the subtitle of Galeano's 1971 work - Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent - and you know why the left-wing, anti-U.S. Chávez would present it to a U.S. President. The book's thesis is that Spain, then Britain, the U.S. and Latin oligarchs ransacked Latin American resources, from copper to crude, bleeding the region of its natural wealth and its sovereign dignity. But even if you don't subscribe to its Marxist-tinged polemic, The Open Veins is one of the best introductions to the longstanding Latin grievances that keep producing populist leaders...
...either Republicans or Democrats in Washington. It not only heartened Latin leaders in Trinidad, it disarmed them. The summit could have easily deteriorated into another yanqui-bashing fest over the U.S.'s role in the global economic crisis or its antiquated trade embargo against Cuba. But Obama had even Chávez feeling "great optimism" that his nation's icy relations with the U.S. will thaw, starting with the return of each other's ambassadors, expelled last year, to Washington and Caracas...
Caracas' opposition mayor, Antonio Ledezma, who is a holdover from the discredited Venezuelan élite that Chávez overthrew a decade ago - but who won the capital last December because of voter anger at rampant violent crime and deficient city services - calls the new law "an atrocity" and "the final blow against decentralization." Chavistas like National Assembly Deputy Carlos Escarra say that's a "grand falsehood" and insist the law was a constitutionally legitimate move "to strengthen the federal district's administration...
...allowed representation in Congress. But it's the sort of two-wrongs-make-a-right rebuttal that won't fly as well in the post-Bush era, says Larry Birns, head of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a think tank in in Washington that has often been sympathetic to Chávez. Birns feels Chávez needs to more now than ever guard against his "self-destructive tendencies and not risk his democratic credibility" if he wants to stay relevant. "One of the things at stake in Trinidad," says Birns, "is whether Chávez remains a hemispheric factor...