Secretary Hillary does a mean Rumba: Was
thisthe most
significant thing to come out of the
Summit of the Americas?
The Americas Summit ‘Fiasco’ (Estadao,
Brazil)
“With wider trade integration dead and buried, the Summit of the
Americas is losing relevance because it lacks a meaningful agenda. With
nothing better to discuss, old rivalries rose to the surface once more, largely
fueled by an inferiority complex toward the United States. ... The Cartagena meeting served only to expose how gracefully Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dances the Rumba.”
The Sixth Summit of the Americas was an undeniable failure.
The summit, attended by of 31 heads of government, ended in silence due to a
lack of subject matter. There wasn’t even the usual post-summit statement, full
of empty rhetoric and concrete proposals that is almost inevitable after such
meetings. With surprising candor, governors and diplomats didn’t even waste
their time and effort on a document produced just for the record. The meeting
ended without even a minimal agreement on creating working groups and outlining
an agenda for the next summit, due to take place in Panama in 2015. Summit
host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, opened it lamenting the exclusion
of Cuba, a vestige, according to him, of the Cold War. But the most plausible
explanation for the very poor ending of the event is of another order. The
hemisphere’s governments lack a pragmatic agenda for discussing common
interests.
Without such an agenda, historic political differences tend
to hamper joint action and undermine cooperation. The Cuban question was just
one focus of disagreement. Argentina President Cristina Kirchner came to the summit
with the desire to build continental support in her dispute with the United
Kingdom over the Malvinas [Falklands]. It didn’t work so she returned to Buenos
Aires before the summit ended. In an effort to limit the damage, the Colombian president
highlighted the most open debate over drugs with President Obama. This is an
important issue, but the scope of the discussion was limited.
The summit in Colombia could still have been of some use,
were governments and diplomats able to learn one simple lesson; efforts to
integrate only produce results if the objectives are made quite clear. This is
precisely why negotiations over a Free Trade Deal or discussions on the Doha
Round could still fail, in whole or in part. But if made clear, such objectives
will serve as a guide for future attempts.
The First Summit of the Americas held in the U.S. in 1994,
was a launching pad for a major project of trade integration that included 34
American countries. While this project was going on, the summits, which bring
together American heads of government, focused on regional issues of trade and
investment. The project collapsed between 2003 and 2004, primarily because of the
ideological myopia of former [Brazil] President LuizInácio Lula da Silva, with the
support of his Argentine colleague, [the now deceased] President Néstor Kirchner. The overall project of hemispheric trade
integration collapsed, but the Washington and various Latin American
governments found other ways to negotiate. Chile led the way. Thereafter
followed talks with Central American states including Colombia and Peru.
Ecuador would have been next if Ecuador President Rafael Correa hadn’t pledged allegiance
to the Bolivarian flag.
With wider trade integration dead and buried, the Summit of
the Americas is losing relevance because it lacks a meaningful agenda. With
nothing better to discuss, old rivalries rose to the surface once more, largely
fueled by an inferiority complex toward the United States.
The cutting words expressed at the summit demonstrate the poverty
of the regional debate. [Brazil] President Rousseff once
again protested in front of Barack Obama the amount of money being issued by central
banks in the U.S. and Europe. And once again, she was complained to the wrong
person. Also, when the press asked her to comment on the exchange rate policy
announced by China at the weekend, she said she was unaware of it – and that she
wasn’t up-to-date on the issue. On the face of it, it appears that her aides
and ministers were more interested in the traditional Latin American sport of sticking
one’s tongue out at politicians from the United States.
Without a serious agenda, the next Summit of the Americas
will be yet another useless and embarrassing waste of time. The Cartagena meeting
served only to expose how gracefully Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dances
the Rumba. That was the most interesting part of the entire summit.
