THE Open Veins of Latin America. It is a title that has stuck with me from the day I began reading the work, in 1980, during my time at school in Toronto. I have referred to it on numerous occasions, in any discussion about books which have had an impression forming character to them. The kind of material which establishes the truth of the proclamation about not being able to put it down once you pick it up.

With the plane carrying the Bolivian president approaching its parking position on the tarmac at the airport last Friday, it came vividly to mind. And as President Morales emerged from the aircraft and headed down the ramp, I began recalling once again, some of that story the book tells in its gripping details about the rape and exploitation of the Bolivian tin mines.

Reciting the title at the time during the narration of the TV6 broadcast of the arrivals and the activities leading up to the opening ceremony for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, there was no way of knowing what was to come inside the next 24 hours.

At the opening ceremony itself a few hours later, Daniel Ortega was to have delivered his long harangue about past hurts, slights and actions of alleged imperialism and exploitation against the people of the Americas. He hurled them in the air, his target the presence of Barack Obama, president of the United States.

We must learn from the past, the US president said in delivering his also now famous ’intellectually elegant’’ reprise, ’but we must not be trapped by it.’’ The next morning he was to be surprised by Hugo Chavez with the presentation of a copy in Spanish of this book, a veritable textbook of capitalist exploitation. It explains a lot about why leaders like Ortega, Morales and Chavez hold on to the positions they do, their world view, whether or not they will agree on having been trapped by it.

’The rich countries that preach free trade apply stern protectionist policies against poor countries,’’ the Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano writes in the Open veins. They turn everything they touch-including the underdeveloped countries’ own production- into gold for themselves and rubbish for others.’’ The book was written in 1970.

Six US concerns control more than a third of the coffee that leaves Brazil, his research revealed at the time. Another six more control what enters the US, Brazil only participates as supplier and victim. United Fruit monopolises the sale of bananas from Central America, Colombia and Ecuador where Barack Obama, as he indicated again in Port of Spain Friday night, will acknowledge his country’s role in this but he wants to move on, his colleague won’t let go.

And there remains a fierce movement of adherents who may be increasingly drawn to his intentions, but are sceptical about his ability to bring about the changes necessary.

With coffee and rubber in Brazil, cacao and then oil in Venezuela, cacao in Ecuador, Galeano wrote, the pattern was the same. For many of those running these countries now, nothing has changed. ’According to official data, seven out of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world. This was 39 years ago.

The Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain which those leaders refused to sign last Sunday, still talks about deep inequalities and persistent poverty. Ortega, Morales Chavez and others weren’t convinced about the ability of the measures being proposed to redress that.

Examining what he then called the ’Invisible Sources of Power’’, Galeano surmised that, ’As lungs need air, so the US rconomy needs Latin American minerals.’’ Coups d’etat, revolutions, spy dramas, he said, were the by products of the Caribbean and Latin American sub-soil. Minerals, he said, had much to do with the fall of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist government of what was then British Guiana.

’The country now known as Guyana is the world’s fourth largest producer of bauxite and Latin America’s third producer of manganese. The CIA played a decisive role in Jagan’s defeat,’’ he wrote.

At his news conference in Port of Spain for the summit on Saturday, Morales was again accusing American interests of being behind plots to topple his government and to assassinate him. It is an article of faith in these same circles that the same interests were behind the failed coup attempt against Chavez in 2002.

Obama is dedicating his presidency to a radical alteration in this order of things. They will not happen under his watch, he told Morales in response.

But the experience being clung to by those who think otherwise, as chronicled in the pages of the Open Veins, remain hard to shake. The book’s revival on the basis of the Chavez gift to Obama will create fresh debate among a new generation, as to whether and how much things have changed, and the ability of the current US president to operate as effectively as the agent of that change deemed necessary.