Word: vez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...That bonhomie was hardly assured beforehand. Obama and Chávez had been critical of each other in recent months, with Obama suggesting that Chávez supported Colombian guerrilla violence and Chávez suggesting, as a result, that Obama was an "ignoramus." To many observers it was a toss-up whether Chávez - who has pledged that he and his leftist allies in the region will not sign the gathering's final declaration, to protest the fact that communist Cuba is still not invited to these summits - would upbraid Obama in Port of Spain or, given Obama...
...seems, does the rest of the region after this summit. To most Latin Americans, Obama could not present a starker contrast to his predecessor, George W. Bush, whom Chávez once called "the devil" and whose relations with the hemisphere were strained at best. Even Bill Clinton as President didn't set foot south of the border until five months into his second term. Latin America, according to many experts, has the worst gap between rich and poor of any region in the world - a big reason why the U.S. has so many immigration-policy headaches. And what Obama...