The Heads of State who've come to Rio

Agreed with much elan and brio

That we should always do what's right,

Resolve all disputes without a fight

Boost the markets, augment trade

Provided efforts are duly made

By others to reciprocate.

We call on every single state

To love their neighbours, help the poor

And so on, and so on.

A senior diplomat penned those lines after the signing of last Tuesday's Rio Summit Declaration, which proclaimed a new "strategic partnership" between Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. The poet must remain officially anonymous, but we can say that he comes from a neighbouring island noted for its pragmatic rejection of emotional gestures.

Undoubtedly, much of what happened among 48 leaders in Brazil's most seductive city had more to do with the left-hand side of the brain than with concrete proposals.

Symbols, however, as we know so intimately in Ireland, are very important in politics, and at the level of symbols Rio was a major success. "The summit was not about trade, it was about status," says Wolf Grabbendorf, director of the Institute for EU-Latin American Relations, who probably knows more about the subject than most of the visiting presidents and prime ministers. "Latin America has come out of Rio with a level of international recognition it has never had before."

This recognition will, he believes, also translate into significantly greater practical weight for the Latin American countries, individually and collectively, in the several crucial rounds of trade negotiations which will start in the next century.

Everyone knew that the most contentious issues on the table in Rio were precisely about trade, and so everyone agreed to disagree about them at another time, in keeping with the feel-good spirit of the event.

Curiously, however, it was in the field of democracy and human rights that the sparks really flew. The dogfight happened at a secret meeting whose agenda was, to the amazement of some leaders, not revealed until the session actually opened. The conventional, if unwritten, script for EU-Latin American relations in this area runs like this: the northern old continent and the southern new one have deep historical connections, which have led to a shared democratic culture.

This shared culture is more sophisticated and deeply rooted than the rather vulgar model which exists north of the Rio Grande. (Those who make this argument conveniently forget that Europe also shares a common history and culture with the US.)

The EU and Latin America's new generation of democratic leaders say that democracy and human rights are fundamental to the health of open market economies, and at least aspire to make their practice a condition for economic integration.

When the secret summit session opened last Monday, however, it emerged - which should have surprised no one - that some Latin American countries have very different views on what constitutes democratic activity to those which prevail in Europe. The session had been called to allow several countries, including Mexico, to complain about the activities of European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on their soil.

This is not a new development - Mexico has made its displeasure at the presence of EU-based human rights groups in the Chiapas conflict known during the last few years.

But the way in which this hostility to civic activists was expressed at the session clearly stunned some EU leaders. The implication, according to one reliable source, was that EU governments should actively discourage NGOs which might be critical of the Latin American governments where they were working.

The Europeans responded, the source continued, by reminding their hosts that democratic governments, by definition, have no role in restraining or muzzling NGOs which operate within the law. It is no bad thing that this sour note was sounded among the summit's sweet tunes, and it is a pity that it was not done in public.

But it is important to remember that there is more at issue here than the barely disguised authoritarian tendency in some Latin American administrations.

That tendency is all too real. Some governments here simply do not recognise any value in what European political theorists call "civil society" - a social space in which citizens' groups act entirely independently of state institutions. The repeated use of this apparently innocuous term in the Rio Declaration had been the source of considerable EU-Latin American tensions, and some references were finally dropped.

But Europe - and perhaps also some NGOs - must also be careful about how they presents the case for citizens' rights. Latin Americans notice our great capacity for moral outrage about miserable poverty on the streets of Rio and Mexico city, and our remarkable ability not to notice the homeless sleeping rough in Madrid or Dublin.

Hopefully, Latin America's enhanced status after this summit will enable robust and open dialogue on these issues to replace what has often been perceived as preachy paternalism in the past.