Latin Trade Bravo X: the 10th Annual Bravo Business Awards: think you know what happens at the Bravo Awards? Guess again

Latin Trade, Nov, 2004 by Greg Brown

There's nothing quite as calming and civilizing as sipping a glass of wine under the stars. Unless it's 1999 and you're running a dot-com company.

That was a heady year indeed. As the cash flowed through the hands of bright young things who were going to remake the business world, a few of them lost a little more than simply financial perspective. At the Bravo Awards ceremony that year, organizers recall, a group from one dot-com that flatly refused to be seated near a rival dot-com.

"If you put us near them, we'll get up and leave," they told hapless LATIN TRADE staffers. So, the tables were far apart--very far apart. Even at the cocktail gathering outside, before the event, one dot-com set up camp in a corner of the plaza outside the Biltmore Hotel, and the other marked off territory in another corner. And never the twain shall meet.

Bravo trivia over the years runs from the ridiculous to the presidential. Like the time U.S. President Bill Clinton showed up. It was a surprise, sort of. He was in town, at a different hotel. By protocol, if a president asks another president visiting the same city for a meeting, he must respond. So, as the story goes, Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu, in town for his Bravo that year, was implored to call up Clinton and invite him to the ceremony. And so there Clinton was, freshly sunburned from a day on the golf course.

A small group of dignitaries was prepped beforehand for a private meeting with Clinton during the awards. They were told some hours in advance to produce U.S. Social Security numbers for background checks. Problem was, many in the group were Latin American executives and politicians--no such numbers, no way to do the checking. A solution was found, and the meeting took place just the same.

One of the recurring traits of the annual event is the Big Rumor. Plenty of important people are invited and confirm they are coming. Usually about a month ahead of the actual night, however, a rumor starts up that someone from an entirely different plane of existence might stop by. One year it was supposed to be the rock musician Santana (no show, although he was in town). Another year, stories ran wild that Prince Albert of Monaco would stop in. He was in the Biltmore, for another event, and is a personal friend of Bravo honoree Francisco Flores, then president of El Salvador.

He also, sadly, did not appear. But the rumor machine is unstoppable. As the story goes, Flores and the prince met up later, after Bravo, then stayed up half the night at the Crobar nightclub on Miami Beach. No English, please. Then there was the president of a Latin American country, which will go unnamed, who claimed all night he spoke no English. Until he met a guest from Seattle and broke out in perfect English, exclaiming, "My wife loves the shopping in Seattle!" No worries, the event is trilingual--English, Spanish and Portuguese--and happily so.

The wife of one politician from the region had no qualms letting organizers know her displeasure at the lack of female Bravo winners. What can we say, folks? Send in the nominations. This year, two women made the grade, and kudos to them for making the way for their peers and generations of women to come, not simply in terms of an award but in their field and in their countries.

People make a lot of demands, reasonable or not. A Bravo honoree representing a beer company asked that only his brand of beer be served at the reception. He was accommodated. A president's food had to be carried in on a separate plate, from his own chef, under guard. Poisoning was the concern.

Then there were the mid-level government executives from Chile and Peru. All was going well, lots of amicable talk about development and business, then someone said the dirty word: pisco. The longstanding rivalry about which country pioneered the grape liqueur flared, and the argument got loud quickly.

Of course, the one folks still talk about is James and the novelty check. Bravo winner Rodrigo Baggio, a Brazilian who brings technology to poor neighborhoods, brought a guest, a young, apparently inebriated young man known only to us as James. Nice fellow, but he kept asking anyone who would listen if his check had arrived. For a while, organizers were perplexed. Check? What kind of check?

Turns out some wealthy do-gooder decided to give Baggio a donation of US$15,000--in the form of a large, cardboard novelty check, the kind usually reserved for lottery winners. The giant gag check was found, and presented, and James staggered into the night, happy.