The presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile did a smart thing the other day, which could save Latin America a lot of time, money and insufferable speeches in the future: they held the region’s first virtual summit.
The four leaders, who are preparing to launch a free trade bloc in June that will be known as the Alliance of the Pacific, met March 5 behind closed doors via video-conference. They were each sitting at a semi-circular table at their respective presidential palaces, flanked by their respective foreign and economy ministers, facing television plasmas where they could see their counterparts in a similar setting.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos later told reporters it was a “historic” meeting, because “we don’t know of any other virtual presidential summit in the world.”
Asked about it, a White House official told me that, indeed, President Barack Obama has used “secure video conferences” for bilateral talks with the leaders of Great Britain, Afghanistan and other countries, but has not participated in any virtual summit involving several participants.
Whether it’s a first or not, it’s a great idea, for reasons that go far beyond the potential savings.
Latin America may have the world record of annual presidential summits. And, from what I have seen covering dozens of these meetings over the past three decades, most of these summits are a sequence of emotional speeches that are full of patriotic fervor, but rarely — if ever — produce any concrete results.
There are more than a dozen Latin American regional and sub-regional economic summits a year, plus several political ones, not counting Latin American summits with U.S., European and Asian countries, and bilateral summits.
Most of them are expensive exercises of political tourism, in which presidents take huge entourages of journalists aboard their presidential planes to chronicle their speeches tailored for domestic consumption. In fact, much like at the United Nations, presidents at these summits don’t talk to one another, but to their audiences back home.
Remember when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez shook hands with Obama at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, and gave him a copy of a book that blamed all of Latin America’s historic failures on the United States? Or when former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe used to point his finger at Chávez at these meetings, accusing him of arming Colombian rebels?
Such theatrics help lift presidents’ popularity, but rarely do more than that.
I recently asked former Peruvian President Alan Garcia, who left office last year and attended most of these summits, whether he and his colleagues could get anything done at these meetings. Garcia laughed, and made a negative gesture with his head.
“Each president goes with his prepared speech to these summits, and is only interested in how they will play back home,” Garcia told me. “It’s a dialogue of the deaf.”
“Normally, presidents take their state television networks and private television channels with them. Their delegations look like caravans of camels in the dessert,” Garcia said, adding that he used to travel by commercial plane, with a very small delegation.
(As he spoke, I couldn’t help recalling that one of the first things Chávez did upon taking office was buying a $78 million Airbus A-319CJ aircraft, and that Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa and Bolivian President Evo Morales followed his steps buying brand new presidential planes for their summit trips.)
“And in these summits, presidents go with their memorized speech to blame somebody else for their problems, whether it is Uncle Sam or the ‘horrendous’ international financial system,” Garcia said.
“They do that instead of doing what they should be doing, which is not seeking re-elections, or a rise in the polls, but work for the people.”
Asked what he would do to make these summits more productive, he said: “I would have two days a year in which we could have all these summits together.” In other words, all 34 presidents of the Americas could meet once a year, and hold their separate sub-regional and issue-specific summits then and there, he said.
My opinion: It’s about time presidents are held accountable for wasting millions of dollars a year in personal propaganda trips, without any visible results for their nations.
A combination of regular virtual closed-door summits and a once- or twice-a-year on-site meeting where presidents could lump together several of their annual summits would be great.
At the very least, it would change the nature of these summits from pure show business to serious work meetings.
