Earlier this week, in the wake of the Summit of the America’s, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote:

The U.S. president simply floated down the summit river passively bouncing off whatever obstacles he encountered. The Chávez “gift” of the 1971 leftist revolutionary handbook “Open Veins of Latin America” followed by a suggestion of renewing ambassadorial relations was an insult to the American people. Granted, giving the Venezuelan attention would have been counterproductive. But Mr. Obama ought to have complained loudly about that country’s aggression. It has supported Colombian terrorists, drug trafficking and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As former CIA director Michael Hayden told Fox News Sunday, “the behavior of President Chávez over the past years has been downright horrendous — both internationally and with regard to what he’s done internally inside Venezuela.”
Too bad Mr. Obama didn’t have a copy of the late 1990s bestseller “The Perfect Latin American Idiot” as a gift for Mr. Chávez. Another way Mr. Obama could have neutralized the left would have been to announce a White House push for ratification of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That didn’t happen either. He only promised to talk some more, a strategy that will offend no one and accomplish nothing. It is a strategy that sums up, to date, Mr. Obama’s foreign policy for the region.

O’Grady added this tidbit over e-mail: The third chapter of (her Spanish copy of) The Perfect Latin American Idiot is called “the Idiot’s Bible.” The Idiot’s Bible? Yes, it’s Open Veins of Latin America.

In the spirit of O’Grady’s recommendation, we asked for a few other expert suggestions for books Obama really should have had on hand.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

President Obama could have given Chávez a copy of Larry Harrison’s Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind, Howard Wiarda’s The Soul of Latin America, or Carlos Rangel’s Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States.

Larry’s book is a classic study of Latin America’s crooked political tradition, part of which is the obsession with blaming the outside world for its own underdevelopment. The suffering that Latin Americans have inflicted on themselves over the years (decades, centuries) is a lot worse than the suffering inflicted by U.S. intervention in the region — or, indeed, by condescending wealth transfer in the form of aid.

Wiarda’s book explores the philosophical roots of Latin America’s world view — what pedants like to call weltanschauung. It draws an illuminating contrast between the centralist, authoritarian, positivist tradition that has kept Latin America in its political and economic infancy.

Unlike the other two, who are American, Rangel was a Venezuelan writer. Precisely because of that it would be fitting for president Obama to give Chávez a copy of one of his books next time. In the 1970s, Rangel published a couple of masterpieces. One of them, The Latin Americans: The Love-Hate Relationship with the United States, demolishes every fallacy construed by Latin American demagogues to justify dictatorship and economic nationalism. He explains, drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary information, why Latin America would have prospered if it had adopted democracy under the rule of law and the free-market economy instead of political thuggery, economic socialism, and international paranoia.

– Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a senior fellow of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.

Mario Loyola

I read Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America while studying abroad in France — a Marxist teacher of Latin American civilization made us read it. The basic thesis is the same as that of so many other Latin American books of the 1960s and 1970s, namely that everything bad that happens in Latin America is somebody else’s fault and — in the modern era — largely the fault of the United States. In that sense, one should applaud Obama’s response, to the effect that we should get past blaming others for our problems. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox caused an international incident when he said essentially that after a classic Chávez rant some years ago.

Obama’s response suggests one obvious candidate for a book he might have given Chávez, namely Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber shows how the English- and German-speaking peoples became prosperous not by exploiting others but through a work ethic, a habit of economizing, and a spirit of self-reliance that has been woefully missing from the culture of Latin America for most of its history. That would help to highlight the ways that the supposed redeeming qualities of Chávez — his extension of social benefits to poor Venezuelans — are perhaps his worst qualities, for they encourage a culture of dependency that can only keep a society unproductive and, inevitably, poor.

It’s sad to think that even with a new left that can point to some record of achievement since the 1990s, so many Latin Americans would fall for a kind of leftist that had already been widely discredited by the 1980s, an admirer of Fidel Castro and the FARC, whose cures turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease as everyone can see.

In the preface to a 2008 book about the FARC in Mexico, the old FMLN leader and steadfast leftist Joaquín Villalobos writes: “In 40 years, Latin America changed, the dictatorships and authoritarianism disappeared, and the leftist movements, even in Colombia, went from secrecy, exile, prisons, and the mountains, into governments and parliaments.” But now that the left’s original enemies are gone, writes Villalobos, “its greatest enemies are its own emotional ghosts and its ideological Marxist-Leninist gods. The former push it to social vengeance, and the latter prevent it from liberating its imagination and opening itself to understanding a new reality.” Villalobos was writing about the FARC, but his criticism applies at least as well to Hugo Chávez and his friends, who live in an idiotic and romantized past, while ruining their countries’ future.

– Mario Loyola, a former adviser in the U.S. Senate and at the Pentagon, is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a frequent contributor to National Review.

Ray Walser

In the reading package for President Chávez, there should be a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 classic All the King’s Men. In many respects, Hugo Chávez has come to resemble the novel’s central character, Willy Stark, a historical stand-in for Louisiana’s Depression-era populist governor, “the Kingfish” Huey P. Long (1893-1935). Like Venezuela, Louisiana in Long’s day was filled with poor, desperate people, a dysfunctional political system, and awash in oil money and corruption. Starks rise from innocence and good intentions ends in a hunger for power and death. Proclaims Warren’s Stark: “You got to make good out of bad. That’s all there is to make it with.” But arrogance and unchecked authority begets Stark’s hubris leading to nemesis. A cautionary tale about the perils of power should make good bedside reading for El Presidente.

– Ray Walser, a retired foreign service officer, is senior analyst for Latin American policy at the Heritage Foundation.