“Santa Marta, Santa Marta has a train, Santa Marta has a train, but it doesn’t have a tram,” says a centuries-old song about the Colombian city. Today, that same port on the Caribbean could say that it has a summit but not a good airport. The 600,000 inhabitants of the capital of the Magdalena department receive this Sunday a dozen heads of state and a similar number of chancellors from the 27 European countries that make up the European Union, and the 33 Americans that make up the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC. But the resort, famous for its beaches and the splendid Sierra Nevada that frames its bay, is on all fours to receive it. Clear proof: on Friday night, the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, could not arrive at his airport. His plane had to fly to nearby Barranquilla, where he was officially received, and then take a military aircraft specially sent from Madrid to take him to his destination.
“They are doing everything at the last minute,” explains a taxi driver at noon on Friday, two days before the session. He points out several construction machinery operators. “Now they take the fresh air [el termómetro señala 26 grados centígrados, con sensación térmica de 40]when the sun goes down they will make those little arrangements again so that the road looks better.” It refers to the wide road, with two lanes in each direction, that connects the airport with the center of the city founded 500 years ago by the Spaniard Rodrigo de Bastidas. Halfway between the two points is the Estelar Santamar, a hotel that will host the official summit, this Sunday, in its convention center. On Friday at 5 in the afternoon, several crews of workers adjusting details to have everything ready on time: the delegations must arrive this Sunday between 8 and 9 in the morning, Santa Marta, and the Colombian Government as host, they want to show off.
But not only with presidents, prime ministers or chancellors. Also with people. Gustavo Petro, the Colombian president, has not chosen the city as the venue for the summit in vain. True to his style, he has highlighted the symbolism of convening in the oldest city that European colonizers founded in what is now Colombia, where Simón Bolívar died 195 years ago, where the left to which he belongs seized power from the traditional political class 13 years ago. It is “the heart of the world,” he has said time and again in reference to the worldview of the Kogi indigenous people, who live in the mountains and before whom he swore his oath of office before taking office at the official inauguration. “We brought 60 delegations to this place, one of the most beautiful in the world, anthropologically, geographically, energetically and scientifically, we are in the heart of the world,” the president celebrated, to close with another of his slogans. ”Colombia, the country of beauty.”
With this vision, the Government has deployed a parallel agenda that has reached out to the city’s 600,000 inhabitants. Its Ministry of Culture, in alliance with the district Mayor’s Office and the Department’s Government, has developed between Friday and Saturday what it has called “Reunion in the heart of the world”, a range of concerts, conversations or film screenings that wink at the critical vision of the colony with which the Nation approached the half millennium of the city, in open clash with a more commemorative vision of the Mayor’s Office. On Friday and Saturday, an urban center full of backpackers and families tired of long hours of sun, received academic conversations such as the one titled The colonial turn, in which the director of the National Archive Francisco Flórez moderates the philosophers Laura Quintana and Santiago Castro Gómez. At the same time, and later into the night, in the streets and squares such as Parque Bolívar or the median over the bay, Samarios and visitors shook with artists such as the Puerto Rican Andy Montañez, the Dominican Vicente Martínez or the Colombian Nidia Góngora. Faithful to the Caribbean spirit, the summit is also a party.
The city also becomes the scene of other meetings, starting with the summit, events that bring its hotel capacity to capacity. One is the business forum that will focus its activity throughout Sunday, and which has been convened by the EU, the Colombian Government, CAF and the IDB group in a hotel in the same tourist area as the summit. Another is the civil society forum of Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union, which between Friday and Saturday received the commissioner for equity of the European Commission, Hadja Lahbib; the director for America and the Caribbean of Oxfam, Gloria García Parra; or the Vice Minister of Multilateral Affairs of Colombia, Mauricio Jaramillo. Between the two, dozens of companies, organizations and entities from Europe or Latin America sent representatives who stayed there or in other complexes on a long beach that runs from the airport to the center, and where busy officials have mixed with retirees or summer families this weekend.