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What the golden-haired young woman staring at her laptop was trying to do was a tall order, given the fragility of celebrity influence, the dubious track record of Latin American governments in providing social services and the lengthening shadow of a global recession that was straitening everyone’s budget.
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So the trick is to take pop celebrity, marry it to big business and permanently alter the way Latin American governments help care for the young and the poor. It cannot be addressed by rich countries’ check-writing. It requires the steady effort of the state. They have a policy focus - early-childhood nutrition, education and medical care - that is on a scale beyond the reach of private charity. They were looking to use the power of pop to help the populations not of distant impoverished lands but of the Ibero-American world from which they come. Then Shakira returned to her speechwriting as we passed above Cuba.Ĭelebrity philanthropy, rock ’n’ roll philanthropy, is no longer a novelty, but what Shakira and ALAS were trying was indeed new. The little group - a publicist, a manager, an aide, the already mute girlfriend - went silent. “I’m afraid,” she said in Spanish, her face momentarily still. His relaxed focus contrasted with Shakira’s nervousness, and periodically Shakira ribbed him about it, which made him grin. At the back of the eight-seater plane was the Spanish megastar Alejandro Sanz, scratching out his own speech, his girlfriend next to him, in a leggy bundle, nursing a bad cold. “And I still have more I want to say.” Tap tap tap. “It’s already too long!” she said, smiling resignedly as she typed out her speech. Now, flying down to El Salvador, staring at her Mac, she was, perhaps, approaching her moment of political breakthrough. Since then they had rallied most of the biggest pop stars in the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking worlds held enormous concerts in Mexico and Argentina gained the philanthropic support of some of Latin America’s richest families (as well as Warren Buffett’s son Howard) and captured the attention of a good number of heads of state. But Shakira has this other side - she began charitable work right after she had her first big hit, at 18 - and two years ago she, her longtime boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, and some of their friends conceived the idea of a loose union of Ibero-American singers, called ALAS (“wings” in Spanish), which would use the power of their fame to mobilize fans, and the politicians fans vote for, to advance the cause of early-childhood development.
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That would be stadium-size, and could be anywhere in the world, filled with thousands and thousands of fans, the people who have made her among the biggest-selling female vocalists on the planet. This was not the usual venue for Shakira Mebarak Ripoll of Barranquilla, Colombia. The next morning, she was to give a speech on the importance of early-childhood development to an Ibero-American summit meeting that would gather most of the heads of state of Latin America as well as the prime minister and king of Spain, the prime minister of Portugal and a select group of somewhat lesser dignitaries. Last October, on the plane from Miami to San Salvador, Shakira stared into her MacBook, pondering.