Obama has chance to help Latin America
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad — President Barack Obama scored high marks in his first meeting with Latin American and Caribbean leaders, but the 34-country Summit of the Americas was largely inconsequential, and its final resolution a joke.
Unlike recent hemispheric summits, where Venezuela’s narcissist-Leninist leader Hugo Chavez stole the limelight, Obama was the undisputed star at this one. Perhaps sensing that he would be left isolated if he attacked a popular U.S. president — a poll by Ibero-barometro released over the weekend shows that Obama is the most popular leader in Latin America — Chavez toned down his anti-American rhetoric, and kept a low profile by his standards.
Obama won near unanimous praise from hemispheric leaders for Zen-like willingness to listen, and reach out to U.S. critics.
When Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega launched a 50-minute verbal tirade against the United States, blaming Washington for virtually all Latin American ills over the past two centuries, Obama listened stoically, occasionally jotting notes. Asked later about Ortega’s speech, Obama refused to ridicule it, merely noting that “it lasted 50 minutes.”
When Chavez presented him with a Spanish-language copy of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano’s book, “The Open Veins of Latin America,” a diatribe whose underlying theme is that Latin America’s poverty is caused by U.S. imperialism, Obama accepted it with a smile.
Gracious response
When Obama was later asked by reporters what he thought about Chavez’s present, he smiled and said, “It was a nice gesture. ... I’m a reader.” It was a gracious response, considering that Chavez’s gesture was the equivalent of presenting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to an Israeli president.
Rather than engaging in nasty debates with radical populist leaders, Obama urged his counterparts to leave old differences behind.
“I didn’t come here to debate the past. I come here to deal with the future,” he told them at the very outset of the meeting.
The response was nearly unanimously positive. Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez told me, “He listened with an extraordinary patience, and he was intellectually elegant in his responses.”
Argentina’s Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana told me, “I can’t recall a U.S. president who has sustained such an open-minded dialogue with the region.”
Still, in private conversations with several presidents and their top aides, I noticed some concern that Obama’s attention will soon turn to other parts of the world, and that the region will continue to be neglected by U.S. policymakers.
Unlike U.S. summits with Pacific Rim leaders, which take place annually and force the White House to follow up on the presidents’ agreements, the Summit of the Americas meets every three or four years. The Obama White House may not focus on regional issues for several years, they noted.
In addition, Obama has yet to meet his campaign pledge to name a special envoy to the Americas, a job that was discontinued by former President George W. Bush, some of them noted.
As for the 97-article final declaration of the Trinidad summit, it is so ridiculously long and full of contradictory statements or meaningless agreements — “we are determined to intensify our fight against poverty,” reads a typical one — that I came across almost no senior official who was taking it seriously.
No signing ceremony
In the end, after Chavez threatened not to sign on to the declaration’s economic chapter and other countries felt the document wasn’t worth fighting for, the presidents canceled the collective signing ceremony. As a face-saving move, Trinidad Prime Minister Patrick Manning, as host of the summit, signed it on behalf of everyone.
My opinion: I’m concerned that, while the European Union and Asian countries steadily expand their economic blocs, nothing of that sort is happening in this part of the world.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.