"This summit was an historic landmark," the German chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, said after the closing session of the EU, Latin American and Caribbean conference in Rio de Janeiro yesterday afternoon.
The three-day gathering ended with the signing, by all 48 states attending, of the Rio Declaration. which commits the two regions to a "strategic partnership" in economics, politics and culture. It is a detailed 69-point document which stresses common values in democracy and human rights.
Some observers found it strange that the same principles could be accepted by, for example, Dr Fidel Castro and Mr Robin Cook. There was undoubtedly a strong element of fudge in getting so many people to agree to so many things.
The political sessions which were closed to the press were wide open to radically different interpretations of the same ideas.
By all accounts, Dr Castro was a star performer, castigating NATO for bombing Yugoslavia, and the US and Britain for bombing Iraq. Speaking with uncharacteristic brevity, he asked whether NATO would now turn its humanitarian attention to Latin America, and bomb Colombia, where a cruel civil war has raged for 30 years.
If Iraq's weapons of mass destruction merited air raids, he continued, when would the US send its air force to cripple Israel's nuclear capacity? Apparently, even those leaders most opposed to Dr Castro's views were not immune to his charismatic rhetoric. A similarly nonconformist line was put by Venezuela's new populist president, Mr Hugo Chavez, who said that societies which tolerated vast contrasts in wealth were not democracies at all, and that access to food, housing, health and education were as fundamental as the right to vote. These interventions were the exception, however, and consensus was much more common than conflict.
The very fact that Dr Castro attended and signed the declaration indicates that this summit was an opportunity for a new set of relationships that no one in either region wanted to miss. Sceptics asked whether the declaration's rather vague resolutions would have much concrete impact. In the sphere of trade, for example, both regions will probably focus more on the World Trade Organisations "Millennium Round" which opens in Seattle this autumn, than they will on building commercial bridges from Brussels to Brasilia.
However, even in that context, the result of this summit is that the EU and Latin America are now much more likely to regard each other as allies at WTO sessions. The setting up of a working group to explore and implement ways of controlling volatile financial markets, which have had such devastating impact in the last two years, is seen as a particularly significant decision of the summit. Neither should the purely symbolic aspect of the summit be seen as insignificant, according to the Tanaiste, Ms Mary Harney, who represented the Taoiseach at the talks.
"The very fact that the major EU players decided to come here for this unique event represents a major new recognition for the place of Latin America in the world," she said yesterday.