We had already finished covering the day in the warm and sumptuous Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, during the 2012 Summit of the Americas, when we decided to have dinner. Exhausted, the journalists just wanted to eat and rest from the intensity of the events. That year, Barack Obama, Dilma Rousseff and Cristina Kirchner, among others, were present. Before the first course arrives, however, one of us gets the news: Hillary Clinton was, at that moment, dancing salsa at Café Havana _a famous nightclub in the city.
We ran out, with luck in time to see the then US Secretary of State smiling, having a beer after dancing with aides and security. That it was at the Havana café added even more color to the news. The US had not yet made its approach to Cuba, which was not even present at the event, but Hillary seemed to no longer have any embargo on the island’s rhythms.
The Summit of the Americas has been, since 1994, the most important forum of nations on the continent, and a space for historical events, such as, precisely, the handshake between Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, who tried to bring the two countries closer, now frozen. This took place at the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama.
In these meetings, important commitments are made, however, having dozens of presidents and authorities from the Americas gathered for a few days in the same city also produces anecdotes, which remain in the memory of those who covered or followed these events closely.
The Cartagena Summit stood out not just for Hillary dancing salsa. In this edition, the famous case of US secret service agents who hired prostitutes took place, shortly before Obama’s landing. The case was leaked and it was only talked about at the opening of the Summit.
Installed in a hotel in the city to prepare the arrival of the then US president, the agents could not resist the temptations of the Caribbean and, even though they were working, they went out to dance and drink and, on their way back, hired prostitutes. Prostitution is legal in Colombia, but the guys didn’t behave well. Some were paid, some were not. One of the women, Dania Londoño, who later even wrote a book about the case, denounced the agents to the local press. The 11 US government officials implicated in the case were sent home and punished.
Also in this edition, Cristina Kirchner, then president of Argentina, had a disagreement with the host, Juan Manuel Santos, because he did not include the issue of sovereignty over the Falklands in the final document. Cristina got angry and left the event early, without saying goodbye. Enraged, she arrived in Argentina and announced the expropriation of the oil company YPF.
In the 2009 edition of Trinidad and Tobago, the hit was the attempt to bring Venezuelan Hugo Chávez closer to Barack Obama, with the following sentence: “I want to be your friend.” It is worth remembering that Chávez had often called his predecessor, George W. Bush, a “devil” in a UN General Assembly.
Obama thanked him, and even received as a gift from the dictator a volume of “The Open Veins of Latin America”, by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, a book that deals with the exploration of the region through its history and is a reference work for the local left. Galeano was a hit again after that episode. Sales of the title then soared.
In 2005, during the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, an “anti-summit” took place, headed by Chávez and with the presence of several left-wing personalities, the player Diego Maradona, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. The objective was to reject the FTAA (Free Trade Area of ​​the Americas), proposed by the United States. The then US president, George W. Bush, had to hear the denial of his project with Chávez’s resounding phrase: “Alca al carajo!”.
Bush is unlikely to have fond memories of his participation in the event. At the meeting in Quebec in 2001, there were marches and demonstrations against him and against globalization. Fidel Castro, who was not present at the meeting, praised the protests, calling them “heroic”.
Demonstrations are commonplace at these events. The one in 2015 was marked by the clash between Cubans in exile and supporters of the regime, who did not welcome the rapprochement between their country and the United States. There were deportations of Cuban delegations and clashes in Panama City as the leaders met. Inside the Summit, Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Nicolás Maduro and Cristina Kirchner (Argentina) made speeches with an anti-imperialist tone. Obama got angry more than once and left the forum on several occasions. In his turn to speak, he urged the complaining officials to calm down, saying: “The Cold War has been over for a long time.”
