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The surprise arrival of Hillary Clinton
La Nacion
March 01, 2010

She will meet today with the President

Silvia Pisani
U.S. Correspondent

WASHINGTON.- In an unexpected change of plans, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will arrive today in Buenos Aires to meet with President Cristina Kirchner.

"We hope to have a good dialogue," sources close to the Department of State told LA NACION last night, confirming the new plan. "The relationship with Buenos Aires is important," said the message. The impression is that there is a good climate for the meeting.

Originally, Clinton had not included Argentina on her first working trip through the Southern Cone, which begins today and that, since the beginning, included visits to Uruguay, Brazil and Chile.

It was the tragedy in Chile that accelerated the change in plans. The events of the devastating earthquake forced a shortening of Clinton's stay in Santiage. And that gave a chance for a stopover in Buenos Aires.

"We've added a stop in Buenos Aires," the assistant secretary for the region, Arturo Valenzuela, confirmed last night around 10:00pm (or midnight, Buenos Aires time). The message from the official arrived via Twitter and was a total surprise to those, for several days, have been following the developments of the trip. There were uncoordindated calls to officials that had already gone to sleep.

Together with the stopover, there were impressions of a shared effort to try to repain the bilateral relationship, as LA NACION reported in its edition the day before yesterday. It's that, after a week of new disagreements, both governments seem ready to try to reverse the deterioration that the bilateral relationship has suffered in the last three months.

The announcement of the stopover was made with the official already en route to the Southern Cone. With changes still possible, the new plan has Hillary Clinton arriving in Montevideo to attend the inauguration of Jos Mujica. In the afternoon, she will go to Buenos Aires, where she will spend the night. Tomorrow, she will travel to Chile for a much shorter visit than was originally scheduled. "There could be new changes," said aides to the official yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana was in permanent conact with high officials of the State Department, including the secretary herself, to close up the details of the meeting today with President Cristina Kirchner, sources at the Foreign Minstry said last night.

The requests by the State Department to move up the time of the scheduled meeting in the afternoon in Montevideo for before Mujica's inauguration got a negative response from the Argentine government. To be able to do so, President Kirchner would have to change the time of her speech before the Legislative Assembly, something she would definitely not do, which was Taiana's message to the State Deparment.

Taiana also spoke by phone with U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Vilma Mart nez, one of the permanent interlocutors to detail the meeting's agenda. The confirmation of the unexpected visit took Foreign Ministry officials by surprise.

Cristina Kirchner continues to hope that Obama will receive Cristina at the White House when she arrives in this city in the next few weeks. Today's meeting will also be a test to prove the vitality of this hope. Today's meeting is all but a move towards getting past the short-circuits that marked last week.

Local sources trust that the first working meeting will be a chance to channel the bilateral relationship. The message from Washington is that the ties to Argentina "are important" and that Clinton herself is "interested" in meeting with the Argentine president.

So much so that, in fact, it was the State Department that offered the meeting, according to what Valenzuela confirmed. Washington has a fluid dialogue with Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. But with the Casa Rosada the lack of trust is more evident. The government of Cristina Kirchner helps that into being. Not only does she not received Washington's envoys, but, with a rare criterion of opportunity, she just let loose her worst diatribe against Obama.

"He's caused disappointment," she said. Obama "is more popular" and has "real commitment" to Latin American, retorted, through Valenzuela's mouth, the government of the United States. The reply didn't sit well in the Casa Rosada, according to what LA NACION learned. But, still with this annoyance, no one came out to reply to Valenzuela.

THE DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP

* The rows. Only 72 hours before Hillary's trip to Argentina, Cristina Kirchner said that Obama "didn't meet the expectations" of the region. The State Department replied that Obama is more popular than other regional leaders.

* The shared agenda. The President and Hillary Clinton will seek to identify "the common agenda" that both countries share, and that would concentrate on condemning terrorism, narco-trafficking and the Iranian nuclear program.

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