The Americanistas

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The spectacle surrounding the gift catapulted Galeano’s book to the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Galeano later thanked Chávez for giving his anti-colonial diatribe an Oprah-book-club-like boost. The Uruguayan writer joked that Dracula and himself shared the honor of creating the vampire genre.

When asked if Obama would read the book, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied, “I think it’s in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side.”

Obama effectively closed that chapter at the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The event is a Washington tradition begun in the 1920s. Every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event. The dinner is part comedy roast, fund raiser and tribute. The press likes to call it the moment the president becomes “Comedian-in-Chief.”

About 10 minutes into his monologue, Obama began a joke saying he was fulfilling his campaign promise of turning around U.S. relations with the world, citing meetings with the Japanese and British prime ministers. Obama continued, “But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that. Take a look at the monitor there.”

The jumbo-tron cut to a picture of Obama sitting in the Oval Office with a man dressed as a pirate. (Not sure if the costume was modeled on Captain Hook or Captain Morgan.) The audience laughed.

Obama then added, “Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — (laughter) — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts.”

Too bad. Obama would have gained a lot of insights from Galeano’s book.

The full joke sequence can be viewed here (put the cursor at about 3:57):

  

The logos of regional blocs in the hemisphere, clockwise from top-left: UNASUR, SICA, NAFTA (only economic), CARICOM.

Ahead of this weekend’s hemispheric Summit in Trinidad, President Barack Obama has offered to meet with Latin American and Caribbean leaders on a bloc-by-bloc basis, the AP reports.

Obama called Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who is acting president of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), to arrange a meeting with South American leaders. Bachelet and Obama are scheduled to talk by phone this morning to set the agenda for the talks.

The Obama administration made a similar invitation to the Central American Integration System (SICA), which is currently led by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a harsh U.S. critic. The U.S. President is already scheduled (tentatively) to sit down with leaders from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) tomorrow night after the Summit’s opening plenary. Bilateral U.S. issues with Mexico, it seems, are being dealt with in a pre-Summit meeting between the two presidents.

Breaking up the meetings in this way – though Obama will presumably have at least some bilateral meetings – makes sense: The three regions will have distinct agendas with the U.S. president.

The Caribbean leaders will ask for more economic assistance and for Washington to stop trying to block (on behalf of U.S.-based fruit companies)  the preferential access Caribbean nations have to European markets.

The Central Americans will request more economic assistance and urge Obama to press forward with a thorough immigration reform. They might also ask the President to further beef up military spending to help fight the spillover effects of Mexico’s narco wars. (Central America is also a key transshipment point for U.S.-bound South American cocaine that makes its way through Mexico.) Central American countries generally had very close ties to the Bush administration (with the exception of Ortega’s Nicaragua), so this meeting won’t be so much about reconciliation as it will be about setting a renewed sub-regional agenda.

In South America, the scenario is quite different. The region is home to nearly all of the governments that have swung to the left in recent years, including vocal U.S. critics such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. All three leaders have expelled U.S. officials in recent years, while Bolivia and Venezuela have practically severed diplomatic ties with Washington.

The South America meeting will be Obama’s largest challenge. Besides the economic crisis, new financing initiatives, and lingering trade disputes (e.g. Doha, Colombia’s FTA), leaders will likely bring up the Cuba issue. All South American governments have called on Washington to change its Cuba policy, and those that stand to make the loudest pitch are Bolivia, Venezuela, maybe Ecuador, and possibly Paraguay. The leaders of these four countries are currently meeting in Caracas, under the auspices of Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas initiative, which includes Cuba, to set a common strategy for the Trinidad Summit.

Before making the case for Cuba, however, the region’s more radical left-leaning leaders will first try to feel out Obama’s intentions on improving U.S. relations with their own countries. This will be a delicate dance: In the eyes of these leaders, all of whom felt grossly insulted by the Bush administration, it should be Barack Obama that tries to woo them, not the other way around.

If Obama manages to restore ties with both Bolivia and Venezuela, this will be a big step forward. On that front, the U.S. administration seems to count on the welcome support of Brazil, which is increasingly  positioning itself as a regional interlocutor. No foreign leaders have hit it off so well with Obama as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

If Obama can strike the right notes with South American leaders in Trinidad and if he does more “listening than lecturing,” as he himself once said, U.S.-Latin America relations could enter a promising new stage.