The Latin American Summit in a rapidly changing world

By the time this article appears in the newspaper, the Summit of the Americas would have concluded its three-day session. The meeting was hosted by President Joe Biden and held in Los Angeles. The American president stayed at the meeting for its entire duration and spent sometime talking to individual leaders. The Summit series goes back to 1994 when then President Bill Clinton invited all heads of state from North, Central and South America to attend a meeting in Miami. This time the focus was on how the global order was evolving after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and at the aggressive advance of rising China in several parts of the world, in particular in Asia.

The global order put in place after the end of the Second World War was being reshaped. In 1945, when the wars in Europe and Asia ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia, there was agreement among the victors that the experience of the world after the end of the First World War in 1919 should not be repeated. Then those who had triumphed continued to punish the vanquished, forcing Germany to pay large amounts of reparations to the victors to compensate the latter for the resources they had spent on the war. That bankrupted Germany and contributed to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. The United States was the clear winner in the Second World War; its contribution was to provide funding to the European nations engaged in the war and supplying military equipment by diverting its large industrial infrastructure to produce for the fighting men and women. Russia also paid a heavy price. It lost 25 million people as it pushed back the invading German armies back to their country.

This was a heavy toll and Moscow deserved a seat at the table where the victors gathered to plan the world’s future. While it was admitted as a member in the United Nations and given the power of the veto in the institution’s Security Council, it was kept out of the other global institutions. It was one of the five permanent members of the Council. However, Moscow was not invited to the Bretton Woods Conference held in a resort in New Hampshire in the United States. The Soviet Union was not included among the invitees as its system of governance did not conform to the structure the victors wished to create around the world. In the Soviet Union one party, the Communist Party, controlled all instruments of governance and private property was not allowed.

The conference established what came to be known as the “Bretton Woods” institutions. The International Monetary Fund, the IMF, was charged with the responsibility of maintaining financial security around the globe while the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IBRD, was given the funds and the responsibility to rebuild Europe and Japan destroyed by the war. The IBRD developed into what is now known as the World Bank Group of institutions.

As the nations assembled in Los Angeles for the Summit, the world was under a great deal of stress that covered financial and political areas. The continuing Covid-19 pandemic, the sharpening conflict between the United States and China, the rise of authoritarian states in several parts of the world, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine were some of the stresses the world was now faced with it. How to deal with these global stresses? Immigration was another area of concern.

In some of the earlier Summits of the America, Washington attempted to work on its agenda. I had personal experience of this in 1996 when the Summit was hosted by Carlos Menem, the then Argentinian president. Bariloche, a city in the extreme south of the country, close to Antarctica was chosen as the site for the gathering. The Summit was attended not only by the heads of state but also by the heads of the international development institutions that worked in the region. On the list of invites were the President of the Inter-American Bank and myself as the head of the Latin America and Caribbean Region in the World. Before we were to leave for the summit, I received a call from the White House from a person who was in charge of Latin America working for the American president. He said that he wanted to see me but did not want to be seen with me. He wanted to come to my office at lunch time and I could have sandwiches brought over. He came and said that since I had spent a long time working on China for the Bank and was responsible for persuading the leadership in Beijing to adopt some private sector initiatives, could I relate some of that to Fidel Castro, the then Cuban president, who will be at the Summit. He suggested that I should somehow arrange a meeting with the Cuban president and brief him on my China experience. “However, the word that you had a meeting with Castro should not leak out to the press in Miami and if that happened, we’ll make clear that was your initiative and not done at our request. You know that the Cuban immigrants in Miami are dead set against Castro.” I related that conversation to the Bank President and the Bank’s Legal Counsel. Both advised me not to accept the American suggestion and hold a conversation with Castro.

When I went to the conference center in the car that was assigned to me by the Argentinian government, I forgot to ask the driver his name so I could call him when the meeting was over. When the meeting ended, I saw Boutros Boutros Ghali coming out. He was at that time the United Nations Secretary General. He was staying in the same hotel in which I was lodged. I knew him a bit and walked over to him and asked him whether I could ride with him back to the hotel. As I was talking with him, I saw Fidel Castro emerging from the meeting hall. “Have you met Castro?” the Secretary General asked me. When I said I hadn’t, he walked me over to where the Cuban president was standing and introduced me as the Vice President of the World Bank. Castro threw his arm around me and said excitedly, “The World Bank, the World Bank! I want a picture taken. Call a photographer.” But no photographer could be found and I escaped the fate that was predicted if my meeting with Castro was reported in the Miami press.

I relate this story to underscore the point that a great deal of planning is done by various agencies of the US government to prepare the country’s leadership when they go to important world gatherings. In the planning that went into the Los Angeles get-together, it was decided that since democratic systems versus authoritarianism would be one of the subjects President Biden would like to pursue, authoritarian rulers from the area would not be invited. Invitations would not be sent to the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This discrimination was not acceptable to the left leaning president of Mexico who said he would not attend the Summit if these leaders were not included. What transpired at the meeting will be the subject of my article next week.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 20^th, 2022.

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