Were it not for the much-publicised cordial exchanges between Presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez, who were meeting each other for the first time on Trinidad and Tobago soil, the Fifth Summit of the Americas would have been a washout.

The event itself was plagued by so many protocol breaches and mismanagement, that it behoves those who were involved in its organisation to take two steps backward and assess their multitude of errors, if they are not to be repeated at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, later this year. The first major glitch was in relation to the invitations.

Imagine: an event fixed over four years ago that has been the subject of intense planning in the last six months, and the invitations to most people locally only went out the day before or the day of the function itself. I would have thought that armed with a protocol list, those who were hired to prepare and deliver the invitations would have been able to do so easily, weeks before the event, as protocol demands. What was the wait for? By the week of the Summit, when calls were being made as to why Members of Parliament, top management of state boards and others had not received any invitations, surely those responsible should have checked to see whether there was a problem.

Deliberate delays

Apparently they did not, and this carelessness saw, for example, some members of the Opposition receiving their invitations the very same day. While some still attended, the message to me in such a late invitation is that your presence was not really desired. As if that were not enough, on Friday afternoon there was a major back-up at the airport, when several private planes of heads of state arrived at or around the same time. The story is that President Obama was the only one—of those who came at that time— to arrive as scheduled, and the others either deliberately or carelessly arrived out of turn.

Be that as it may, it was apparent that there was no contingency plan in place to deal—at least in part—with such an eventuality. Some heads remained in planes for as long as two hours, I was informed. The opening ceremony was thus delayed by some 55 minutes, and then was further dragged out when President Ortega was allowed to speak for 50 minutes, instead of the ten minutes each speaker was supposedly allocated. Prior to that, attendees had to undergo a verification procedure at the Stadium/Parkade. After this, they were shuttled to the Hyatt, where things were nightmarish.

People were never ushered to their seats, but were pointed in the general direction, resulting in mass milling around. The worst was at the entrance, where one’s name had to be found on a list among hundreds of names, all printed in very small print. It appeared that the lists were not complete—each person at the door had part of the list. Instead of having attendees check at booths, for instance, labelled “A-G” or “H-M” checks had to be made arbitrarily. It took a friend of mine half-hour to find her name on the list, and she was fortunate. After that frustration, one had to listen to Ortega carry on for nearly an hour. These were not among T&T’s best moments. The fight between the security and media, when the latter attempted to speak to

Waist hug

Chavez, was another negative at the event. The more problematic situation with the local media, however, I was given to understand, arose from the lack of accreditation they suffered. So while President Obama and Mr Chavez and others had journalists as part of their delegation, the local journalists were on their own.

They had to scramble for stories, chasing behind leaders—including local leaders—who were making style. Those leaders who walked with their journalists ensured that they fed them sufficient stories. This did not happen with the local media, who had to be fishing for stories off the foreign press (apart from those that took place in full public glare). It was noticeable, too, at his news conference, held at the Hyatt around mid-morning on Sunday (while an official photo was being taken at the Hyatt) to which a couple of our journalists were invited as mere spectators, President Obama fielded questions only from his selected journalists. There were other bloopers in this three-day Summit, some minor, some major, some funny and some not.

Failure of the organisers to have the Police Commissioner pass orders (delegated laws) authorising traffic restrictions, to which I have previously alluded in this column, was a major. The seemingly spontaneous full-waist hug of President Obama by our Foreign Affairs Minister, who should be an exemplar of protocol, is, to my mind, a minor issue and is just funny. What was particularly outstanding, to my mind, was the fact that Mr Manning alone signed the Declaration of Commitment, despite the promotion beforehand that all the heads would sign at the end of the Summit. It was unsuccessful obfuscation on his part to say he was signing for all of them. Still, if all the Summit fosters is a more cordial relationship between Latin America and the US, it will not have been in vain.