ANDRE BAGOO Sunday, April 26 2009

IT BEGAN poorly. Some of the 34 leaders who gathered for the Fifth Summit of the Americas on April 17 had to wait in their aircraft, circling the Piarco Interna-tional Airport for a chance to land. One of them, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, actually had to wait for 45 minutes on the tarmac and watched as US President Barack Obama landed and disembarked even though Harper had landed earlier.

Then at the opening ceremony, which started late due to the Piarco hiccups, the already frustrated leaders were made to sheepishly walk into the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency in a mini-parade as though they were at the Olympics or participating at a beauty pageant. Obama looked clearly embarrassed, his lips pursed. But in contrast Prime Minister Patrick Manning was smiling, madly.

Suddenly, there was a call for President George Maxwell Richards. But as members of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force held up their trumpets for what seemed like an eternity, waiting eagerly to welcome Richards, the President did not appear. For five minutes, the nation panicked at the thought that the summit’s organisers might have forgotten to invite the person who—when last I checked—was still the Constitutional Head of State. The omission would have been plausible; after all the show really wasn’t Max’s. But he turned up nonetheless, and graciously made his way to the front row of the ballroom audience with his wife Dr Jean Ramjohn-Richards at his side.

When the time came for Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega to speak, he made it clear that he would speak for longer than planned because of how long he was made to wait at Piarco. He then went on to deliver a 50-minute speech that was like a slow act of revenge, throwing jabs at a long line of American presidents and then dovetailing into talk of environmental catastrophe and the end of mankind.

On Saturday, as the leaders sat down at a Trini banquet, feasting on delights like “Hummingbird Cake” and “mango ice-cream”, the Divine Echoes performed. With horror, the nation listened as the Prime Minister’s personal band played what sounded like salsa-inspired musak to an audience of Latin American leaders who would be well acquainted with the real thing.

It ended as it began. On Sunday, the official photograph ceremony disintegrated into chaos as the organisers failed to respect the very pools they had created. Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez opted out. And nobody stayed behind to sign the summit declaration, except Manning. Mere hours after the debacle the Associated Press reported that the final photo “never came together”.

“It was the final piece of a summit plagued by disorganisation. The host country failed to provide transcripts of speeches, cancelled news conferences, and imposed a temporary media ban Saturday,” the report, sent over the wires around the world, read. AP and other international journalists also picked up on the contradictions of Trinidad and Tobago, reporting on the fact of the Beetham slum, right on the edge of the summit. AP, however, missed the fact that a perfectly legitimate protest nowhere near the summit’s red zone was halted by the police on Saturday. Officers, in riot gear, gathered at the St James Amphitheatre because a group of people were drumming. The group were protesting the lack of accountability in spending for the summit, among other things. That was the final absurd piece of a summit that could have been quite awe-inspiring, but which turned out at times to be overwhelmingly embarrassing.