After a hectic three days accommodating literally thousands of guests for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, Port of Spain began to return to normalcy on Sunday evening, as Heads of State of 33 visiting countries hosted by Trinidad and Tobago President Patrick Manning began departing, after a series of intense meetings had drawn to a close, clearly with serious unfinished business – chief among them being the continued exclusion of Cuba from what is dubbed the Inter-American System, and a half-century-old blockade imposed by the United States on that country.
The Summit, which closed peacefully and with the usual pomp and circumstance on its third day, was supposed to climax with the collective signing of the Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain – a 22-page document with 97 paragraphs, but the official website of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez says that the majority of the Heads of States were not even close by when Manning signed the document, over which the leaders could not reach consensus, even though they agreed that Manning, being the Summit’s chair, could sign it alone on their behalf.
This notwithstanding, Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow, who is also the chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), hailed the Fifth Summit of the Americas as a success when he spoke with Amandala at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port of Spain, on the closing day.
But it is not a success that comes without controversy and criticisms levied by some Trinidadian locals that it was a waste of government money that their country cannot afford in these tough economic times.
Multiple sources say the Summit cost the Trinidad government over a billion dollars in local currency (the exchange rate is about 3 TT dollars to 1 Belize), but Manning told the press that it was well worth it, because the expenditure would ultimately enable Trinidad to attract more investment, and, even more significantly, aid in bringing priceless peace and harmony to the region.
Five broad areas covered at the Summit and in the Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain are: human prosperity, energy security, environmental sustainability, public security, and democratic governance.
PM Barrow had said on Wednesday, on his departure to the Fifth Summit of the Americas, that this is a summit from which countries would come away with the concrete pillars, the new building blocks of regional understanding – one that will be far more egalitarian, that would be far more sensitive to the needs of small states such as Belize. Barrow leaves Trinidad Sunday feeling that those concrete pillars had been laid down at the Summit.
“It’s been a good summit for us, I think… I am very, very happy indeed with the way things have gone,” said Barrow, while heading off to a retreat where the Heads of State concluded their dialogue but did not reach 100% agreement on the declaration.
The earliest presidents to leave Trinidad were two of the headliners – US President Barack Obama, who held a briefing for US media at the Hilton Hotel just before leaving on his presidential plane – Air Force One, and Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, who reportedly left on a commercial flight.
Obama arrived at the Summit venue cryptically hidden from the view of the public – except for official TV footage screened in Port of Spain, dodging anxious reporters waiting to take shots of him as he entered the Hyatt where the Summit was hosted. They expressed disappointment that Obama had slipped through another entrance, taking a detour from the front door entrance used by all other Heads of State of the Americas.
While Obama was not so visible to the public in Port of Spain, Prime Minister Dean Barrow, chairman of CARICOM, said that Obama participated actively in all the discussions, and there are concrete ways that Belize will benefit from the Port of Spain talks.
“CARICOM had a bilateral meeting with President Obama [on Friday night after the opening of the Summit] and his delegation, one with Prime Minister Steven Harper of Canada and one with the US Congressional delegation. That’s where the issues of particular concern to the region surfaced, and that’s where we received assurances that I thought were very valuable indeed,” PM Barrow told Amandala Sunday morning.
While an olive branch is being extended in these areas, the same is not true on the matter of tax havens. Belize, dubbed as one of the tax havens of the Caribbean, is taking considerable heat from the developing world, which held their summit as the G-20 superpowers ahead of the hemispheric summit.
“This whole question of tax havens and the pressure that the developed world is bringing on our jurisdictions with respect to the offshore financial services sector – because that’s important for Belize – I said that our international financial banking sector has deposits of in excess of $200 million US dollars, that hundreds and hundreds of jobs that are allied to this particular sector and in fact, if this sector were to be destroyed, it would have a seriously deleterious effect on our economy,” Barrow told Amandala.
He added that, “We were able to bring that to the attention of both Prime Minister Harper and President Obama, and to receive assurances as well from the Congressional delegation that while the US will not necessarily retreat from some kind of action with respect to what they call offshore tax havens, they will proceed in a manner that will see them try to work in partnership with us to ensure that the sector isn’t destroyed.
“The question of us being able to access finances for our development in Belize, for assistance with infrastructure and job creation, from agencies such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and even now the IMF, these were themes that we discussed in detail, especially with President Obama,” reported Prime Minister Barrow.
According to Barrow, Barack Obama promised to have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was also present in Trinidad for the Summit, indicate exactly how this additional money for the IMF will be disbursed so that Belize and the rest of the region can get its fair share.
“There is agreement that additional resources will be given to the Inter-American Development Bank. You know that already this year, we’re receiving something like 60 million Belize dollars from the IDB,” said Barrow.
“Those additional monies, this additional capitalization, will mean that Belize can access even more money from the IDB, ditto for the World Bank and possibly even from the IMF.
“When we spoke to Prime Minister Harper, he spoke of increasing scholarships to Belizeans. It means again, that more Belizeans can get an educational opportunity to go to Canada and to do degrees. So there are very, very practical ways by which attendance at a summit like this advances the interest – the direct, material, fundamental interests of the citizens of Belize.”
Only hours after his meeting with the countries of Central America, Obama left Trinidad, departing before host Prime Minister Patrick Manning signed the Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain, fixing only his signature to a document that purports to be a commitment for all 34 countries of the Americas.
Manning said at the closing of the Summit that his counterparts had agreed during an earlier Heads of Government retreat in St. Ann’s, where he lives, that he could sign the contentious document on all their behalf – including Belize’s Prime Minister Dean Barrow.
Of note is that the final copy of the document posted on the Fifth Summit of the Americas website, http://www.fifthsummitoftheamericas.org, does not bear Manning’s signature.
The negotiations leading up to the adoption of the declaration were complicated by the fact that just before the Summit, the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), and especially Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, had agreed to reject the Port of Spain declaration. (Having Manning alone sign the document effectively saves face.)
Speaking exclusively with KREMANDALA after a meeting on Sunday morning between US President Barack Obama and countries of the Central American Integration System (SICA), one of the bilateral meetings held with CARICOM leaders as a part of the Summit, Barrow said that he hadn’t seen anything in the plenary sessions held Saturday or in any of the side sessions that suggested that the declaration would not be signed by all 34 countries, although he said he could not be certain that they all would.
But almost four hours later, it was just Manning, Prime Minister of Trinidad and chairman of the Fifth Summit of the Americas, who emerged to sign the document, in formal ceremonies held at The Diplomatic Center in St. Ann’s.
Still, Summit headquarters claimed “…the hemisphere’s leaders concluded the Fifth Summit of the Americas with a consensus to advance joint solutions to address the most pressing challenges facing the region.”
The theme of the Summit of the Americas was “Securing Our Citizens’ Future by Promoting Human Prosperity, Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability.”
“The opening sections of the Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain focus on the three pillars of the theme—human prosperity, energy security and environmental sustainability—while later sections address ways to strengthen public security, democratic governance and the Summit of the Americas process itself,” an official Summit of the Americas statement says.
In his statement on signing the Port of Spain Declaration of Commitment, Manning said: “This Summit has been a historic event for us here in Trinidad and Tobago and for the wider CARICOM region, and has exceeded by far all our expectations.”
He added that, “The Port of Spain Summit was characterized by mutual respect and an eagerness and genuine desire to work together on solutions to the many challenges facing the Hemisphere. Several leaders expressed the view that Port of Spain marks a turning point for inter-American relations and for building a stronger community of nations.”
Manning also said that Latin America and the Caribbean are now at a different crossroad in their relations with each other and with the United States of America. “With the changing political landscape, the terms of engagement have changed and occasioned by an altogether different posture that is based on mutual respect and equality among partners,” said Manning.
He added that, “The leaders of the Hemisphere agreed that we now have a real opportunity to put inter-American relations on a completely new footing, which sees all countries, big or small, developed or developing, as equal partners. Such relations must be built on the basis of new vision and a people-centered development strategy.”
Even though leaders discussed the worsening financial crisis during the Summit, the final declaration – two years in the making – did not outline specific commitments for dealing with what is deemed the most pressing issue.
This was one of the reasons some Latin American states gave as to why they cannot support the Port of Spain declaration. The other was the fact that the document does not address the exclusion of Cuba and does not mention that country even once.
Speaking at the opening of the Fifth Summit of the Americas, Nicaragua president, Daniel Ortega, delivered an almost hour-long speech which seemed to be an appeal to US President Obama to identify with Cuba’s struggle, using the analogy of the struggle of African-Americans to end racism and segregation in the US, while implicitly suggesting to Obama that he could leave a better record than his predecessors from Washington.
Ortega went as far as to say that he was ashamed to attend a Summit of the Americas that excludes Cuba, and he also pointed to the case of Puerto Rico as another state that the US needs to take action on to move relations in the region forward.
But while the Cuba question lingered for the entire duration of the Summit, and remained unresolved even as the Heads of Governments began going their own way at the end of the Summit, participants were preoccupied with the projections that the world will record negative growth in 2009 for the first time in 60 years.
“While the economies of the Western Hemisphere fared much better in 2008, growing on average by 4.8 per cent, economic growth is expected to slow sharply in 2009 to around 1.0 per cent,” said Manning. “The countries of the Americas now face higher than expected declines in the price and volume of exports, restrictions in access to trade financing, difficulties in accessing other kinds of external finance and reduced remittances from migrant workers.”
The plight of the nearly 200 million poor people in the Americas has to continue to remain at the forefront of the minds of leaders, as well as the urgent social crisis of Haiti, which Manning said will have to be on the table when Heads meet again at the OAS General Assembly in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in June.
In a press briefing held on Sunday afternoon, Honduran officials invited journalists to travel to Honduras for the meeting.
Honduran president, Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales, said at a press conference attended by Amandala at the International Finance Center in Port of Spain Sunday afternoon that it was expected that leaders would have had serious clashes at the Summit, and that socialist and capitalist camps would remain at loggerheads during the proceedings, but they didn’t.
Summit participants got worried during the opening ceremony when Ortega made a scolding speech against the US and its long-standing policies dating back to the early 1900’s, which Ortega claims not only undermined governance in Nicaragua and other Latin American countries, but also actively financed rebels to destabilize governments in the region.
Just off a hunger strike, Bolivian president, Juan Evo Morales Ayma, accused the US of officially orchestrating an assassination attempt on him just before the Summit. But US president Obama said he had no part of that and declared that his administration was ushering in a new era. He not only refuted those allegations, but publicly condemned any efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments.
Speaking at the same venue to journalists about an hour earlier, Canadian president Stephen Harper said that confrontation had been replaced with dialogue, and he pointed to “good chemistry between some of the principal antagonists…”
Headline news on Friday – the opening of the Summit – was that Obama and Chavez had shook hands, signaling a willingness to at least come face-to-face to address their differences. Trinidad media reports say that Chavez had left the meeting optimistic that Obama would be kinder to the region than his predecessors, and that with the announcement four days before the start of the Summit that he was easing restrictions on travel and money transfers to Cuba by relatives abroad, a move was being made in a promising new direction.
Obama made it clear that he did not agree with all that was said at the Summit by the Heads of States, but what had been demonstrated was that they were willing to make progress on old debates.
Shifting back and forth between French and English, Canada PM Steve Harper announced Sunday evening, in a press briefing held for Canadian journalists but which we were allowed to attend, that Canada had further trade and development talks with CARICOM at the Summit of the Americas.
He pointed to a unique program initiated by Canada, through which the country would establish 5-year technical programs with countries who sign trade agreements with it, and also supply funds for the OAS electoral assistance program.
The aim is to promote three sets of ideas in the hemisphere, said Harper: promote our democratic values; confront issues of security; promote economic interest, including specifically keeping markets and investment channels open.
He said that what was useful about the Summit is that there were no divided camps, and there were useful dialogue and improved talks, where the vast majority of countries have fallen in line with the G20 consensus, under which the IDB program is to utilize funds in making sure the hemisphere participates fully in receiving from vast amounts of capital to spur growth.
“When I arrived here, I wasn’t so sure that we would want another summit,” said Harper. “We don’t need ideological harangues. We are moving ahead on all sorts of bilateral relationships without that.”
During the course of the Summit, Trinidadian entrepreneurs were able to showcase their products at the Summit Village, where steel pan players also displayed their talents in creating music with what “Trinis” say is the most recently invented instrument of recent time.
Notably, on Saturday, 12 spouses of Heads of State, prominent among them Mrs. Kim Simplis-Barrow, wife of Belize Prime Minister Barrow, had a dialogue on sustainable development initiatives and concerns. And on the day before, Friday, hundreds attended a meeting inside the Princess Theatre onboard the Carnival Princess cruise ship, where representatives of the indigenous community, labour, private sector, civil society and youth presented their own declarations for action to the respective ministers responsible for foreign affairs in their country. Belize Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington, sat at the front table.
Organizing the Summit was also a learning experience – logistically – for Trinidad and for journalists, many of whom were displeased with the limitations imposed on them by Summit organizers to access official Summit events.
On Saturday, because of an alleged breach of protocol, all media coverage events were cancelled by the Summit secretariat. Also, one journalist from Guyana told Amandala that she was inside a meeting room where Obama and other Heads of States were talking when the light was accidentally switched off and journalists – who were given very limited time to snap pictures – rushed aggressively, competing with each other to get the best shots as fast as they could.
Fortunately, the media events were reinstated later that day, but Belizean delegation officials noted that after Saturday morning’s events, Belize – not involved in the tussle – was not granted any more passes for the other events, including the closing briefing – this despite the fact that Belize’s Prime Minister sits as head of CARICOM.
We note that for the most part, it was international media houses and local Trinidadian media that were given access to the final day’s events and no Belizean journalist was selected to cover any of the final day’s events, including the closing ceremony and the signing of the declaration and the closing press briefing where Manning joined three other Heads of States in fielding questions from the press.
Obama’s press conference, Amandala sources say, was also restricted to those that had pre-registered and attended mostly by US and international media. A Trinidadian journalist told us that she tried Friday to arrange entrance to Obama’s press briefing, and she was told that she would have had to register, but still could not because the conference was already full.
Trinidad media complained after the Summit that the press appointment to take a final official photo did not work out as had been planned, for Obama and some other key heads of state had already left before the time of the shoot.
Despite the shortcomings in the arrangements for the Summit, Trinidad received warm thanks and accolades for taking on the grand initiative to host the Fifth Summit of the Americas.
Trinidad, a country far more developed than some of its Caribbean neighbors, will also play host to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November.
For now, residents are relieved that their capital city is now back to normal and they no longer need passes to go to their homes. Red zones which barred non-official vehicles from passing certain areas have been lifted and the roads are deemed passable once more.