The World

By Daniel Dombey, US diplomatic correspondent

Travelling with Hillary Clinton this past week has given me a distinctly unusual perspective on the world.

For instance: on some stops just about all you see is the inside of the presidential palace. So I can report that Argentina’s famous Casa Rosada or Pink House, from whose balcony Evita Peron made appearances before Argentina’s shirtless masses, is in a distinctly dodgy state of disrepair.

Outside, the building seems incandescent in the evening light. Inside, the colonnaded patios are buttressed by cheap bits of plywood and black plastic lining and one patch of land has been converted into an apparent building site. It’s all rather a reminder of the long and disastrous economic slide that took Argentina from being one of the richest countries in the world at the start of the 20th century to virtual bankruptcy just a few years ago.

By contrast, Guatemala’s presidential palace which like the Casa Rosada has colonial style touches but is a 20th century pastiche is an unexpected pleasure.

The inner courtyard where Clinton and president Alvaro Colom gave their press conference is full of light and from the balcony you can look on to Guatemala City’s main square, with its cathedral, jacaranda trees, peanut sellers and parrots flying past.

When we arrived in a convoy at the palace schoolgirls lined the square crying out Clinton and Colom’s first names in a cheerful spectacle that felt less North Korean than it probably should.

Now Guatemala is very far from being an uncomplicated success story – it would take too much space and expertise I don’t have to go into the problems facing Mr Colom and his country. He spent some of last year denying he was involved in the murder of a prominent lawyer who just before being killed made a videoed denunciation of the president; this year a UN-backed commission found that Mr Colom was innocent of the murder and that the lawyer had in fact orchestrated his own death. The soldiers who lined our route from the airport were also a reminder of the country’s civil war, the longest in Latin American history, which ended only in 1996.

But that only goes to show travelling in the bubble on such trips gives you a different angle on things – one which is often much more informative and illuminating about the policies and personalities of the visiting delegation than it is about the places being visited.

Aside from the presidential palaces, four star hotels and conference centres are the natural – and sometimes exclusive – habitat of the travelling diplomats on these sorts of trips.

Yesterday, I watched Hillary Clinton sit at a horseshoe-shaped table where some 50 people pontificated on their visions for Latin American prosperity. As she gave her controlled little nods – not too vigorous but just enough to stay awake – while they droned on, I wondered how many such anonomously chandeliered and carpeted ballrooms she had spent time in during her extraordinary varied public life. Probably thousands. And there will be hundreds more, together with the airport hangars, presidential palaces and foreign ministries.

In a few hours time we fly back to Andrews Airforce Base and I am heading home. But the Hillary Clinton show is set to stay on the road for quite some time to come.

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