He may not be his party’s most famous action hero, but United States President George Bush bolstered his tough-guy credentials on Saturday night when he waded into a melee in Santiago to rescue one of his secret service bodyguards.
The president, on his first foreign trip since being re-elected, strode off the red carpet after a fracas broke out between US secret service agents and Chilean police blocking their way to an official function. He reached into the crowd and yanked out the bodyguard, then walked away, straightening his cuffs and looking none too pleased.
Hours later, the Chilean president, Ricardo Lagos, abruptly cancelled a grand state dinner for 200 because White House security was insisting all the guests, including Santiago’s finest, would have to pass through metal detectors and possibly be searched.
”President Lagos considered it unacceptable that the top authorities in the country and leading businessmen be submitted to searches that are humiliating,” a presidential aide told the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio.
Just before an official summit dinner for the 21 heads of state on Saturday, President Bush and his wife, Laura, were walking inside the Estacion Mapocho cultural centre, when Chilean police sealed the entrance.
Six members of Bush’s security team began clamouring for access to the US president, who, hearing the commotion, left his wife, turned around and walked into the melee. Images of Bush reaching into the crowd and pulling his bodyguard into the official dinner were shown on Chilean TV.
A small working dinner was held instead, but the incident reflected the bruising effect of the overwhelming White House security retinue on a smaller country.
Albert Cienfuegos, the chief of the Carabineros, Chile’s national police, described the attitude of the US secret service as ”excessive professional jealousy”.
Tension between security officials in Chile and their US counterparts had been building for months before the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Santiago.
”The Americans were asking for one of the events to be moved because they didn’t approve of the location,” said a top member of the Apec organising committee in Chile.
”Finally, the Chilean authorities told them, ‘Look, we have 21 heads of state invited to this event, if you don’t want to go, fine’.”
The White House spokesperson, Scott McClellan, told the press: ”The president is someone who tends to delegate but every now and then he’s a hands-on kind of guy.” – Guardian Unlimited Â