http://www.heritage.org/Research/LatinAmerica/wm905.cfm

The Keys to a Successful Americas Summit
by Stephen Johnson
WebMemo #905

November 2, 2005 | |

Since its inception 11 years ago, the Summit of the Americas, run by the Organization of American States (OAS), has been an important forum for OAS presidents to confront shared issues and concerns. It has also become a venue for endless photo opportunities, commitments with little follow-up, and platforms for rants by mischief-makers like Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chávez.

This year’s Summit, to be held November 4 and 5 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, is already looking like a bad date that the 30-odd attending heads of state may want to forget the morning after. To make this encounter useful, delegates should follow a spare agenda, attend to root causes of problems to be solved, and deny spoilers attention they crave.

Slight Expectations
Summits can be time wasters when there are too many of them. Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer points out there are at least a dozen meetings for heads of state every year in our hemisphere. They include the Ibero-American Summit (with Spain and Portugal), the European-Latin American Summit, the Rio Group Summit, and the South American Summit, to name a few.

Nearly all generate long to-do lists that individual nations find hard to implement. In the Summit of the Americas process, some countries stacked up nearly 250 commitments between 1994 and 2001. Few states have acted on more than half of them, no doubt prompting the OAS’s Summit Implementation Review Group to stop showing progress in spreadsheet form on the Summit website.

Bland Stew
In seeking consensus, summits rarely challenge the status quo. This year’s themeâ€â€