Word: summiteer
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...less than two weeks, when the latest contingent of 34 American leaders meets for the third quadrennial summit, in Quebec City, the confident smiles will be back in place. The two-day gathering will produce a joint political declaration that bolsters the democratic solidarity of the hemisphere and an 18-point collective "action plan" that covers initiatives ranging from toughening the war against drugs and providing rural areas with access to computer technologies to the creation of a pan-American network of weather forecasters to assist in the management of natural disasters. And the meeting will undoubtedly announce significant progress...
...other things will be very different from Miami, starting with the less than sunny atmosphere. The latest summit meeting place, a French-speaking city whose picturesque 18th-century old town was denominated as a world heritage landmark by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, will be fenced off and guarded by phalanxes of police in riot gear. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to descend upon Quebec City to vent their spleen at capitalism, globalization and the evils of free trade and to demonstrate their conviction that the FTAA will make things worse instead of better...
...Long-standing tensions and rivalries between NAFTA and Mercosur have blossomed into a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war over the summit agenda. There are major uncertainties about how the meeting chemistry will be affected by the interaction among newcomers like U.S. president George W. Bush, Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada and the mercurial Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez Frías - alongside such veterans as the durable Jean Chrétien of Canada and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...Above all, there is the daunting challenge of the hemisphere's diversity, which brings together at the summit leaders from some of the world's poorest and smallest nations, as well as some of the most populous and richest, including the global superpower, in a search for common political, social and economic ground. They represent a potential clash of every conceivable kind of interest (except one, since nondemocratic Cuba is excluded), made more acute by the economic uncertainty. And as a carefully stage-managed event designed to cement pan-American solidarity, the Quebec City summit, like its predecessors in Miami...
...atmospherics as the summit approached seemed to support that view: the hemisphere resembled a checkerboard of multiplying trade quarrels. Just two weeks ago, despite their intimate NAFTA partnership, Canada and the U.S. moved to the verge of a multibillion-dollar trade war over softwood lumber; it came not long after a bruising spat between Canada and Brazil that involved subsidies to airline sales and, briefly, a shutdown in the beef trade. Brazil was in a row with the U.S. over the pricing of generic aids drugs that added another thorn to a perennially prickly relationship...