Gestures that are worth a thousand speeches

Apr 18, 2009, 22:52 GMT

Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez (R) hands US President Barack Obama a book during a meeting with the UNASUR Countries at the Summit of the Americas at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on 18 April 2009. EPA/MATTHEW CAVANAUGH

Port of Spain - A fair amount of tension was expected at the Summit of the Americas this weekend in Trinidad and Tobago, and yet it appeared to have been mostly defused by Saturday with a couple of meaningful - and possibly unexpected - gestures.

A handshake and a book seemed to have radically changed a gathering that had looked very difficult.

Early Saturday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave US President Barack Obama a copy of the book Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America), a classic by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.

The essay that Chavez presented Obama with - prior to the meeting of the US leader with his peers from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) - is widely regarded as a key work to understand the region's recent and not-so-recent past, and its difficult ties with the United States.

'I thought it was one of Chavez's books,' Obama said. 'I was going to give him one of mine.'

Chavez's wink to Obama was perhaps meant as a response to the latter's gesture Friday, when he surprised all observers - and Chavez himself - by walking up to the Venezuelan to shake his hand.

Chavez had arrived in Port of Spain all set to fight. Neither Venezuela nor its left-governed allies Nicaragua, Bolivia and Honduras would sign the summit's final declaration, he had said from his country.

Nor were they going to miss the chance to make it very clear to Obama that the exclusion of Cuba from the regional gathering - since it was suspended from the Organization of American States in 1962 under pressure from the United States - was 'unjustifiable.'

And yet harsh words gave way to kind gestures almost immediately. Trinidadian media, and many foreign media too, put the handshake on their front pages.

'Let's be friends,' said the headline that accompanied the historic photo in some dailies. 'A new beginning,' others stressed.

Chavez himself told reporters of the chance encounter with Obama as leaders got ready to start the summit's opening ceremony.

'We shook hands like any gentlemen, right?' Chavez said. 'I am grateful for his gesture of having directly come up to shake our hand, and I could not reject such a delicate gesture.'

At the same time, however, Chavez said he had made it clear to Obama that then-US president George W Bush had shaken 'the same' hand eight years earlier. Relations soured later, and the Venezuelan even called Bush 'the devil.'

The US delegation explained later that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega also walked up to the president. Obama was said to have replied in Spanish, to say that he was glad to meet him.

The gesture did not prevent Ortega from making the longest speech of the opening ceremony, and also the hardest with the United States.

But Obama - who reaped the loudest applause of the evening in a setting with a Latin American majority - picked up the glove and in turn joked with the Nicaraguan president to relax the atmosphere again.

'I am very grateful that President Ortega didn't blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,' Obama said to prompt laughter in his audience.

There was broad consensus in Port of Spain that the delicate atmosphere at the start of the summit had relaxed a fair amount.

Still, there was no sign that the nice words, handshakes and presents would be followed by more solid moves like a hemispheric consensus or even the signing of a joint final declaration.

There were still two intense days ahead, full of meetings, negotiations and speeches. And a lot of room for more gestures.