Costa Rica gears up to host largest summit in its history.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
The summit meeting of the Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribenos (CELAC), to be held this month in Costa Rica, sets a major challenge for this country: it is the largest international meeting ever organized in the nation's history.
Despite the austerity the present government works with in general, all logistics have been covered, organizers told NotiCen. This ranges from welcoming the 32 national delegations at the Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Santamaria --named after one of Costa Rica's most important national heroes--to security for all participants, some of whom pose a major problem in this field --particularly Presidents Raul Castro of Cuba and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.
It also includes 6,971 meals for everyone from presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers, to police, traffic cops, intelligence agents, and volunteers--boy scouts, members of civil society organizations, university personnel, among others. Covering all expenses, the budget is just more than US$4.3 million, a high figure for a developing nation.
The meeting will mark the closing of Costa Rica's exercise of the yearly rotating presidency of CELAC and the start of Ecuador's term.
Benefit of consensus
In Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel Gonzalez's view, "This is a quite young process, since this will be only the third summit," but it has provided sufficient time to realize that consensus is the instrument to solve common problems--setting divisive issues aside.
"There are different needs and problems in the countries making up this community," Gonzalez told a Jan. 14 press conference held with his Ecuadoran counterpart Ricardo Patino. "But, with the effort made, it has been possible to identify those on which there's consensus, and that the problems are the same, that the weaknesses are the same. And we've understood that it's only through unity, dialogue, consensus, and joint work that those weaknesses can be more efficiently attacked and overcome."
Within this context, CELAC is "a bridge through which Costa Rica is able to interact, to hold talks more efficiently than through bilateral relations or as a member of other international organizations," said the minister. "That's the value added we see" in the community. "It's the potential for integration, exchange of experiences, exchange of good practices, exchange of problems, addressing each other, leaving aside other issues--including the perception of what the political system or the economic...
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