It’s appropriate that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez presented President Barack Obama with a copy of the bestseller Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, authored by grievance-mongering leftist Eduardo Galeano. 

That’s because Chavez and a cadre of other barely-democratic Latin American presidents took Obama to school at the fifth inconsequential Summit of the Americas. 

Unfortunately, the summit didn’t have to transpire this way.

First, consider the offending tome.  The Los Angeles Times called the volume a Latin leftist’s bible, though it’s surprising that any publication would, save for irony, allow its journalists to elevate such a treatise to Bible status.  Religion aside, the Bible is a book of enduring truths about mankind’s purpose in the world—it’s timeless.  Published in 1971, Open Veins is not only yesterday’s news, it’s yesterday’s views since dependency theory is a mostly discredited concept in reputable educational and policy-making circles.  Count as dependency theory skeptics the Economic and Social Issues panelists of a colloquium titled An Agenda for the Americas jointly held by the George Washington University Center for Latin American Issues (CLAI) and the Strategic Studies Institute of the United States Army War College. 

Co-hosts of the seminar, which also featured a panel on Governance and Security, included the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Inter-American Dialogue, the Council of the Americas, the Heritage Foundation, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) and the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA).

The event was held during the run-up to the Americas Summit and featured Inés Bustillo, Director, Washington Office, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); Peter DeShazo, Director, Americas Program, CSIS; Eric Farnsworth, Vice President, Council of the Americas; and Mustafa Mohatarem, Chief Economist, General Motors Corporation.  Panelists agreed that the neo-liberal model had strengthened Latin American economies and prepared them to weather the global economic downturn.  They also observed that Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia’s populist governments and their mismanagement of natural resources had wasted commodity gains and caused missed investment opportunity.

The Americas Summit itself was a circus along the lines of the UN General Assembly or the laughable tractor pull that is the UN World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

U.S. print media, as expected, highlighted garish photo-ops of leftists behaving badly at the Americas Summit and broadcast outlets offered the same.  Far worse was the ILO- and UN-influenced summit agenda and final declaration focusing on human security, that favorite catchphrase of multilateral institutions that puts the cart (benefits of development) before the horse (development).

Mary Anastasia O’Grady of The Wall Street Journal called the President’s participation in the summit a missed opportunity and as usual she is spot on.  In her column, she justly laments that the President failed to call for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners and failed to ask his hemispheric counterparts what they thought of the Castro dictatorship’s appalling human rights record. 

On the whole, the summit – while a noble idea in theory – misses the mark.  The challenge of holding such a gathering is not only the difficulty in building consensus among diverse participants.  The task is starting from a point of intellectual neutrality, maintaining it, and for Latin America it is preventing the established roots of prosperity—individual liberty, economic openness, responsible governance, and fair competition—from becoming casualties of ideological grandstanding.  To put it bluntly, when the patients are running the insane asylum it’s time to establish another forum for these critical issues’ discussion.