Today I had the distinct honor of attending the Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas Conference, in Playa Bonita, Panama. You can read about the conference here. Basically, every country in the western hemisphere that has signed a free trade agreement with the U.S. came together to talk about some of the things related to trade. Sam Navarro, the Panamanian foreign minister who hosted the conference, said the purpose was to humanize trade, bring it back to the worker making products for export and that sort of thing. To me, a lot of it seemed like reassurances. Most of the Ministers took their time to reaffirm that despite the economic crisis, they intend to continue to work toward free trade. It was an excellent conference, if not world-altering.
I was working with the American delegation, and was shocked by the amount of work that goes into these. For the last week, basically the entire embassy (and the U.S. embassy has several hundred people) has been focused on making sure that every second was planned and scripted. Of course our sheer size didn’t help; most of the delegations had 4-6 people attending, while the American delegation numbered 23 (at one count, some people were entering and leaving). It didn’t all turn out, as I’m sure you can guess with something this complicated, but things generally went according to plan.
Perhaps most interesting, is that everywhere the Secretary plans to go has a Foreign Service Officer assigned to it; she is there to plan a nearly minute-by-minute schedule and ensure that if anything changes the party knows about it. This officer is also responsible for calling right before things get going, so the Secretary never arrives too soon to an event. I wonder if that means she’s always running just a tad late…
