Trade Show

is the Argentina correspondent for The Economist. Rarely has so little been expected of a group so powerful, but the 34 dignitaries that got together last weekend for the fourth Summit of the Americas managed to disappoint even the most skeptical observers. Held in this tacky Argentine seaside city, the summit convened the leaders of every country in the Western Hemisphere, save Cuba, to address job creation in the Americas. The proceedings were supposed to yield a consensus declaration of governing principles and a plan of action. But what they really yielded was fresh evidence of the tragicomedy that American politics has become, on both sides of the North-South divide.The sticking point in the talks was the hypothetical Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), which would eliminate trade barriers in the hemisphere. The Bush administration insisted on ramming a timetable to restart negotiations on the accord, which have been stalled for years, into the summit's final joint declaration. This set the stage for a showdown with Venezuela's bombastic Hugo ChAvez, a sworn enemy of President Bush, who announced he had "brought a shovel" to "bury" the plan. "alca, alca, al carajo!" ChAvez bellowed to some 25, 000 demonstrators who had gathered to hear him speak at a nearby stadium--"ftaa, ftaa, go to shit!" Rivaling the uninvited Fidel Castro in long-windedness, the Venezuelan president spoke for two and a half hours while the venue emptied by half, due either to heavy drizzle or rhetoric fatigue. Although the summit was widely perceived as a standoff between ChAvez and the man he calls "Mr. Danger"--Bush--Venezuela was not alone in the anti-ftaa camp. Argentina and Brazil, South America's largest economies and biggest agricultural exporters, also refused to endorse hemispheric free-trade discussions until the U.S. makes satisfactory cuts in its farm subsidies. They, in turn, were supported by Uruguay and Paraguay, the two other countries in the Mercosur trade bloc. With five nations in nonnegotiable opposition to the ftaa and the United States unwilling to take it off the table, the joint declaration was dead in the water. All but a handful of presidential limousines departed Saturday afternoon without agreement on the declaration; finally, the remaining negotiators feebly attempted to salvage the summit by including both sides' positions on the ftaa in the document, thereby acknowledging their disagreement. This lame escape hatch proved little consolation for the conference's Argentine hosts, who hoped a deal would bolster their international reputation, which was severely tarred after the country's $100 billion debt default in 2001. The host country's logistical efforts were scarcely better: One press conference was delayed for nearly two hours with no explanation before being canceled, while a question-and-answer session with Argentina's interior minister turned out to be a no-questions-asked photo op. And the security precautions proved farcical: Despite the machine gun-armed battalions manning checkpoints on many streets in the city center, violent demonstrators spent an hour burning a downtown bank before the police intervened. While the protesters ran amok, Argentina's president, Nestor Kirchner, was making a mess of his own at the summit's inauguration ceremony. Kirchner never seems comfortable unless he has picked a fight, and he wasted little time on the official agenda of job creation before proceeding to bash one of his favorite targets, the International Monetary Fund, and its neoliberal economic prescriptions. In a face-to-face meeting with Bush that morning, Kirchner had failed to extract a firm promise to support Argentina's request to refinance its debt with the Fund; so, as usual, Kirchner took it to the peanut gallery. "Those international organizations who, by imposing [orthodox economic policies], contributed, encouraged, and favored the growth of that debt must also assume their share of the responsibility," he intoned, to ample applause from the left-wing delegates in attendance. His remarks hardly qualified him as an honest broker who could wring an agreement out of the Bush and ChAvez factions. His last-minute cancelation of a meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox, a strong ftaa proponent, didn't help, either. Perhaps the most harmonious moment during the inauguration ceremony was an outbreak of onstage hugging during the curious interpretive dance that followed Kirchner's speech. Even that show seemed to reflect the underlying climate of conflict, since the performers had previously torn an immense wooden cake to shreds. Yet, if Kirchner went too far in disturbing decorum, he didn't go nearly far enough to placate the protesters, many of whom considered him a co-conspirator for meeting with Bush at all. Argentina's left has already been disappointed by his conservative domestic fiscal policy. As the skies cleared in the afternoon and the demonstrators sprung to life with anti-Yanqui songs, Kirchner was not exempt from criticism. "It's double-talk," said Federico Lizarazo, a 23-year- old history student demonstrating near ChAvez's speech. "He brings Bush here and then talks about equality." The widely recognized disagreements did provide for some moments of levity. In a joint press conference after meeting with Kirchner, Bush thanked him for hosting the event and acknowledged that it's "not particularly easy to host, perhaps, me"--probably a reference to the thousands of protesters who had demonstrated enough mastery of English to sport fuck off bush t-shirts. The following morning, Fox held a news conference of his own, in which a journalist asked him how he could reconcile his stated desire for closer links to Mercosur with his support for the ftaa. "My love is broad and total for the two of them, " he responded. "But if there is no `yes' to my marriage proposal, I'll continue making love to them both." The summit did not prove disastrous for the White House, as its ftaa proposal was backed by 28 of the other 33 countries present, and Fox even suggested that those nations proceed with the talks without the opposing Mercosur countries and Venezuela. But the trade accord's emergence as the region's principal political cleavage could drive the anti-ftaa cabal toward even closer links with the true U.S. economic rival, China. Last year, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Brazil, and Argentina while on a South American tour and promised massive capital investments in exchange for preferential trade considerations, a move widely seen as an effort to secure access to the continent's natural resources. ChAvez himself visited China in December and offered similar rhetoric. If the air between the United States and the Mercosur- Venezuela faction cannot be cleared after their standoff in Mar del Plata, Washington runs the risk of driving those countries even further into Beijing's arms. Moreover, by blocking consensus on the ftaa and implanting his rival "Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas" (as he calls his movement) in international media coverage, ChAvez seems to have emerged stronger. He has diligently courted his neighbors by spending petrodollars on their debts and industrial contracts, and he is likely to gain even more momentum if Evo Morales, a representative of Bolivia's coca growers, wins the presidential elections scheduled there next month. That would link two of South America's energy titans (Venezuela boasts the continent's largest oil and gas reserves, and Bolivia is second in gas) in an alliance publicly opposed to private capital and to the United States. Meanwhile, the temperature between Bush and ChAvez is only getting hotter. William M. Arkin's Washington Post blog reported the week before the summit that the Pentagon lists Venezuela as an emerging "rogue" state and a "threat" in internal documents. After leaving Argentina, Bush warned of resurgent Latin American ideologies "playing to fear" and "blaming others for their own failures to provide for their people." Belligerent U.S. behavior only strengthens ChAvez's claims that the United States is hostile to Latin America. About the only thing participating countries did agree on was the selection of Trinidad and Tobago to host the next Summit of the Americas. But it would take a major transformation in hemispheric politics to give that summit a decent chance of being any less futile than this one.

By dan rosenheck