When Venezualan President Hugo Chavez presented Barack Obama with a book at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April, the world was hungry to know what it was. Obama himself played dumb, smiling midly, hardly responding to a work that traces a disturbing history of European and US exploitation of Latin America. Considering his reputation as a well-read man of literature, it seems vaguely surprising, but nonetheless, his country devoured it - raising it to number #2 on the amazon.com bestsellers list practically overnight.

The book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, was written by journalist Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay in the 1970s. Galeano describes how the quest for natural resources - gold, coffee, copper, cheap labour - defined European and US engagement with the southern continent. From colonialism to capitalism power was maintained through crippling loans, political interventions and economic dependency, that wreaked havoc on the lives of the people of these underdeveloped nations.

The original edition was banned in Chile and Uruguay, in 1997 it was republished with a foreword by Isabel Allende who describes it is a seminal work of Latin American history...'Great literary works like this one wake up consciousness, bring people together, interpret, explain, denounce, keep record, and provoke changes'.

It remains uncertain as to whether or not Obama has read his copy. Scribe has just published it in Australia and it is available in store now.