Summit of the Americas: Our reporter’s search for something to hope for
It was the moment that those of us covering the Fifth Summit of the Americas were waiting for.
Just months into his presidency in April 2009, Barack Obama was signaling a new kind of U.S. leadership in the Western Hemisphere by meeting and chatting with regional socialist bad boy Hugo Chávez at the gathering in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
The two leaders shook hands and smiled, and Mr. Chávez took the opportunity to slip the American a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tome on imperialism in the region, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”
Later an unfazed President Obama would tell us that rather than wagging a finger at Mr. Chávez over the direction he was taking Venezuela, he had simply
