Dear FT, thank you?
July 9th, 2009The lede paragraph of a July 5th Financial Times article (subscription needed) on China’s growing influence in Latin America:
When Hugo Chávez first met Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in April, the Venezuelan leader could not resist pressing one of his favourite tracts into the US president’s hands. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a staple of student radical literature, tells the story of a continent that has long seen itself as the victim of foreign exploitation. Mr Chávez, though, may have given the book to the wrong leader. It should have been given to the Chinese.
It’s a nice conceit. I should know, I used it for my April 20th post: Did Chavez give ‘Open Veins’ to the wrong president? In fact, at the risk of a lowly blogger sounding unduly self-important, am I the only one that finds the coincidence suspicious?