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The Americas meet in Monterrey: Hefty goals, paltry outcome


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

March 24, 2002

It was demonstrated long ago that gathering several dozen chiefs of state and prime ministers plus the heads of multilateral financial institutions in one place is no way to make any progress towards solving any of the world's problems. High-sounding speeches will be made, competitive posturing will be the order of the day, toothless resolutions will be approved and, when it's all over, everybody will go back home and quickly forget the whole thing.

Nevertheless, in a triumph of hope over experience-or perhaps because of the I've-got-to-do-something syndrome that occasionally affects high-ranking bureaucrats-United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan called for the International Conference on Financing for Development that was held last week at Monterrey, in northeastern Mexico.

Its goals were sublime. They were those set at the 2000 U.N. millennium summit in New York-a global plan for lining up the financial resources required to battle AIDS, provide universal primary school education and halve, by 2015, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day.

Furthermore, the Monterrey plan, drafted in advance, envisioned freer trade, greater foreign investment, debt relief and more efficient government as well as more foreign aid. An ambitious agenda for a Monday-to-Friday meeting.

President Bush did what was expected of him. In his speech he called for a "new compact" for global development by insisting that rich nations give foreign aid to poor nations only if poor nations undertake a broad range of political, legal and economic reforms.

"Pouring money into a failed status quo does little to help the poor, and can actually delay the progress of reform," Bush said "We must accept a higher, more difficult, more promising call."

The current American foreign aid budget is $10 billion. The president reiterated a promise of a 50 percent increase in American foreign aid over three years, a pledge that meant that the total American foreign aid budget, if approved by Congress, would be $15 billion by 2006.

The European Union sounded less generous, with its promise of $4 billion per year. But the Bush commitment has to go though some hoops before it becomes reality. Congress must first approve that money, and the Bush administration must also develop the specific standards for economic, political and legal reform, making it unclear how much new money will actually flow from the United States to poor nations this year-a legitimate issue for debate at the meeting.

But debate is not what these meetings are about.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on his populist track, denouncing the United States for all the ills suffered by Latin America and proposing that the International Monetary Fund change its name to the International Humanitarian Fund and adjust its policies accordingly (he didn't provide details).

Cuba's Fidel Castro spoke for only eight minutes (repeat: eight minutes) and announced he was leaving the conference. Presumably, he was upset because the U.S. government had asked Mexico's to arrange things so that Bush would not run into him at the conference.

However, we know what the Cuban dictator thinks about the "Consensus of Monterrey" grandiosely proclaimed at the meeting. He left behind in charge "comrade" Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's rubber-stamp congress, who announced Cuba would not sign off the "Consensus. It is "a document that very soon will be seen with sadness," he said, "We will not associate ourselves with a document that we believe is far away from the needs of humanity at this time."

Pressing matters required Nicaraguan president Enrique Bolaños to abandon the conference suddenly on Thursday, when he was advised that his predecessor and party mate Arnoldo Alemán had been indicted in Managua on charges of fraud.

Also on Thursday, Peru's president Alejandro Toledo rushed back to Lima to deal with the aftermath of the terrorist attack in the vicinity of the U.S. embassy, which left nine dead and more than 30 wounded, raising concerns about security for Bush's visit there on Saturday and prompting criticism of Toledo in Peru for having relaxed former president Alberto Fujimori's crackdown on terrorism.

Argentina's president Eduardo Duhalde couldn't care less about the "Consensus". For him the meeting was just an opportunity to lobby U.S. and IMF officials on help for his country.

Host Vicente Fox, Mexico's president, had his own fish to fry. Bush's presence was an opportunity to pump up the U.S.-Mexico relationship, which is high on concept but low on content. Never mind world poverty or the other concerns of the meeting. Fox was hoping for concrete progress on goals such as immigration reform that would legalize some 3.5 million illegal Mexicans in the United States, which right now seems possible-if at all-only in a very distant future.

But perhaps nothing symbolizes the bizarre context in which these gatherings take place than the arrival, a couple of days before the meeting, of the official team of interpreters from Germany to Monterrey . . . in California. It turns out that the Berlin's foreign ministry officials who arranged the flight didn't know the meeting was in Mexico.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

March 24, 2002

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