Word: canc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1981-1981
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Considering the summit's theme of world poverty and hunger, the setting for the conference was a trifle incongruous. Cancún is a lush, 14-mile-long island resort near the Yucatan Peninsula, studded with gleaming hotels and condominiums. Delegation leaders were assigned identical two-room suites, complete with terrace and Jacuzzi, in the pyramid-shaped Sheraton Hotel, hard by the Caribbean. On the day before the conference began, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos went waterskiing, while Reagan and his aides lolled away half an hour on the beach...
...summit ended, the participants tried to put the best face on its ambiguous outcome. "Our purpose was to renew the dialogue between the North and the South," said López Portillo. "This was done." Added Algeria's Ambassador to the U.N. Mohammed Bedjaoui: "We leave Cancún with great enthusiasm." Yet the results hardly rate those reviews, for the summit failed to reach an agreement on the two most important issues: global negotiations and a World Bank energy affiliate...
Nothing could have been accomplished without the acquiescence of the most important industrialized nation, the U.S. As one European official of the Agency for International Development put it, "The Americans hold all the cards, and they know it." Under the circumstances, perhaps, Cancún might best be termed an educational experience...
...What happened here was all that was possible," said a veteran U.N. observer. "At a minimum, these people know each other better now." Yet for the leaders of the Third World nations present at the conference, the meaning of the word Cancún -"pot of gold" - must have seemed supremely ironic...
Indeed, casting an eye toward the Cancún conference where Reagan was even then propounding a formula for free world economic planning, Nixon was enthusiastic. "I'd do more economically...