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Bolivia hosted a major climate change summit this week, but it was hard to tell that from the headlines of Latin America's major media. The four-day event, the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, hosted by Bolivian P
Bolivia hosted a major climate change summit this week, but it was hard to tell that from the headlines of Latin America's major media.
The four-day event, the People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, hosted by Bolivian President Evo Morales, was a first for the region, and attracted more than 12,000 delegates from over 100 countries.
Morales proposed the grassroots gathering following the Copenhagen climate change summit last December, arguing that the views of developing countries and Latin America's poor were largely ignored at that summit.
For the thousands of people from indigenous and social movements, the Cochabamba summit was a rare and important opportunity to voice their concerns in a global forum about the impact of climate change and to share their knowledge about how to tackle global warming.
Their enthusiasm, though, was generally not shared by the region's mainstream press.
Other local and international events, including volcanic ash spewing in Iceland, financial woes in Greece, rising political tensions in Nicaragua, presidential election fever in Colombia and bicentennial independence day celebrations in Venezuela tended to overshadow news from the climate change summit.
In part, that's because of how Morales is perceived by many of the region's other leaders and by the editors of Latin America's media.
Morales, who leads one of the poorest nations in Latin America, enjoys little of the high profile of more powerful regional leaders from places like Chile and Brazil. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president and a close ally of Bolivia, was the only other Latin American president to show up at the Cochabamba summit.
Among many Latin American leaders, the summit was seen as little more than a gathering of leftist dignitaries and organisations determined to promote their socialist-inspired policies, something of little interest to the more right-learning governments of Chile, Mexico, and Colombia.
At the summit, Morales' speeches were peppered with his well-known Marxist interpretation of world events, which he sees as part of an ongoing battle between western capitalism and socialism.
Such a world view tends to inspire yawns rather than excitement from Latin America's mainstream editors.
The summit also faced the challenge of making one of its key messages - living in harmony with nature - resonate with Latin America's non-indigenous population in a region where over 60 percent of people live in cities.
What did make headlines were some of Morales' oddest assertions, which provoked fierce criticism from everyone from chicken farmers in Brazil to international gay rights groups.
The chicken we eat is full of female hormones, Morales told delegates at the opening of the summit. As a result, when men eat it they tend to "deviate from their manhood," he said, in a reference to homosexuality.
Argentinas leading newspaper, Clarin, mocked him with the headline: For Evo, there are more gay men because of chickens.
Morales also suggested that eating chicken pumped full of hormones was responsible for baldness and predicted that within 50 years everyone will be bald.
His sometimes inaccurate comments about industrial farming tended to overshadow the substantive proposals made at the summit, including demands that industrial countries make binding commitments to tackle climate change, cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent and set up an international court to punish climate crimes.
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