CARTAGENA, Colombia — President Barack Obama’s weekend trip to an international summit meeting here, which was never expected to make much news back home, is now grabbing plenty of headlines — for all the wrong reasons.
A scandal that broke into public view Friday with reports that about a dozen Secret Service agents and officers had been sent home for alleged involvement with local prostitutes spread to the U.S. military Saturday night. Officials announced that five military service members were ordered confined to quarters in what the White House said was the same incident at a hotel here earlier this week.
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The sex-tinged controversy loomed over the first working day of the 33-country Summit of the Americas, a semi-regular gathering of heads of state from across the western hemisphere launched during the Clinton administration.
White House officials were tight-lipped about the pre-trip episode and the ongoing investigations into what happened. They insisted it wasn’t interfering with Obama’s diplomacy but conceded that they were losing some control of the media narrative.
Asked whether the flap had distracted the president from his work, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “It has not. I think it’s been much more of a distraction for the press. … Our focus here and the president’s focus continues to be on the meetings he’s having.”
While the president himself may have escaped the media frenzy over allegations of misconduct by his security detail, what he did encounter early Saturday wasn’t exactly smooth sailing.
At Obama’s first public event here linked to the summit, two of the most prominent leaders at the meeting pounced on him over U.S. economic policies that make it harder for Latin American companies to compete with U.S. firms. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos charged that U.S. monetary policies, implemented to jump-start the economy, have raised the prices of their goods sold to the U.S.
“Expansionary monetary policies in and of themselves, in isolation, bring a protectionist element,” Rousseff said during a CEO summit running parallel to the leaders’ meeting. “Obviously, we have to take measures to defend ourselves. … A country will have to realize that it cannot allow its manufacturing base or industries to be cannibalized.”
While Rousseff said Europe bears a large share of the blame, Santos chimed in moments later, reminding the audience that the U.S. is at fault, too.
“I share … the concern the Latin American countries have with the expansionist policies of the developed countries, including the U.S.,” Santos said. “In that way, they are exporting their crisis to us.”
Both leaders spoke as they were seated on a stage just a few feet from Obama during a three-way discussion moderated by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
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