Think of the Miami Summit as a Giant Rotary Meeting of the Americas : Trade: GATT and NAFTA have persuaded Latin America that the United States is serious about economic cooperation.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. news media regards presidential summits as little more than glorified photo opportunities. Even we journalistic policy wonks who write for the editorial pages tend to share that somewhat cynical view.

But while the meeting President Clinton will hold in Miami this weekend with the 33 other elected leaders of North and South America will surely have its share of carefully staged “photo ops,” the pictures that result this time will be notably different than those shot in 1967, when the last hemispheric summit was held at Punta del Este, Uruguay.

For one thing, there won’t be any military uniforms on the dais. For the first time, every government at a Western Hemisphere summit will be represented by a civilian. Cuba’s increasingly anachronistic leader Fidel Castro wasn’t invited, obviously. He wasn’t invited to Punta del Este, either. But some of the “democratic” leaders President Lyndon Johnson met with in 1967--like Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza--were not a whole lot better than Castro. They weren’t Marxists, however, which is all that counted during the Cold War.

In Miami, for the first time since World War II, the Western Hemisphere’s leaders will meet without any external threats--and the attendant “security issues”--to deflect them from the far more important issue that Clinton has put at the top of the agenda: closer economic cooperation in the Americas. In effect, this will be less a political gathering than a business meeting. Kind of a high-level Rotary convention.

Granted, economic cooperation is no stranger to summits. But this time, the Latin American leaders, most of them elected on promises of national prosperity, are primed to do something about opening up trade. The debut this year of the North American Free Trade Agreement and, more recently, the U.S. entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, gives Clinton a strong hand to take into the meetings. By signing onto NAFTA and GATT, the United States proved it is not just going to sermonize against protectionism but is willing to live by free-trade rules that give other countries the same access to our home market that we want to theirs.

And for the first time ever, the other countries in the hemisphere agree with us. All are opening their economies to outside investment and lining up for the chance to sign onto an expanded NAFTA or other regional trade pacts, such as Mercosur, which covers Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

After decades of protectionist trade policies and statist economic plans that led even wealthy nations like Argentina to fiscal disaster, a new generation of Latin American political leaders has come to the fore. They not only believe in free markets and open economies; they have pinned their political futures on them. I refer here not just to Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo or his predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who studied economics at Ivy League universities, but even to home-bred leaders like Argentina’s Carlos Saul Menem.

Consider this anecdote from Peter Hakim, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a forum of business, professional and political leaders from throughout the hemisphere. At a meeting with some leaders of the guerrilla movement that nearly toppled the U.S.-backed government of El Salvador in the 1980s, Hakim asked what the former rebels wanted from the United States. Investment, they replied. Just a few years earlier, these former Marxists were targeting every U.S. link, from the embassy to soft-drink distributors, and running their capitalist countrymen out of their homeland at gunpoint.

Now, I am not suggesting that the Miami summit will mark the dawn of an economic millennium for the Western Hemisphere. El Salvador, to cite just one case, still has monumental problems to resolve in the aftermath of its bloody civil war.

And so does the United States. Nasty gestures of anti-foreign sentiment, like California’s vote in favor of Proposition 187, or the opposition to NAFTA and GATT by political dingbats like Ross Perot, are sad proof that the increasing cultural and economic integration between Latin and Anglo America won’t be smooth.

Still, it’s inevitable, as any of those neatly tailored suits gathering for the summit photo ops in Miami could tell you. Opening doors is just too darn good for business.