This week’s US summit should be an opportunity for the US government to meet with its neighbors to find effective solutions to immigration and security challenges. Instead, even the left-wing El Salvador newspaper El Faro notes that the meeting is another foreign and domestic disaster for Biden’s team.
Four of the Latin American countries responsible for 90% of immigration flows to the United States – Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – do not send their heads of state, which is a slap in the face to the administration. It also means that the crisis on open migration borders, which has led to recent security difficulties – such as an attempt by a Hezbollah cell member to smuggle ISIS terrorists to assassinate former President George W. Bush – will remain unresolved.
President Joe Biden cannot blame anyone but himself for the apparent possibility that one of the landmark events in US “near abroad” policy will fail. This is due to a mixture of bad governance and destructive ideology. Honduras and Mexico follow the Cuba-Venezuela-Nicaragua alliance, which would prefer to deal with Iran, China and Russia. Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua boycotted the summit – and Biden then expelled them – despite Biden’s recent efforts to normalize business and tourism relations with Cuba and lift energy sanctions from the Maduro regime.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giamati have been sidelined by Biden’s persecution of the respective governments.
President Joe Biden’s condescending border policies are causing security problems in Latin America. ISAAC GUZMAN / AFP via Getty Images
El Salvador’s cooperation has been essential in pursuing policies that would reduce illegal migration from that country to America. Bukele has worked closely with the Trump administration to secure the borders of the brutal gang MS-13, which is now one of many violent organizations in El Salvador facing arrests, trials and possibly imprisonment for its crimes. Guatemala has also proved to be a crucial partner on internal and external security issues.
But as soon as Biden took office, he put government officials in those countries on the US corruption list and launched campaigns against their heads of state, especially Bukele, accusing him of human rights abuses and secret negotiations with MS-13 and others. gang.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who had no previous experience in immigration or Central America, had to manage economic policies that would benefit US-Nordic relations by helping to attract investors to those countries. The idea was that increased economic opportunities would inspire the poor in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to stay at home instead of fleeing to America. Instead, Biden’s team shifted humanitarian aid from the El Salvador government to left-wing human rights NGOs and continued to persecute Bukele for taking action to crack down on criminals – many of whom eventually roamed the streets of the United States.
The Trump administration has worked with Salvador President Naib Bukele to stop the dangerous gang MS-13.REUTERS / Jose Cabezas
Harris’s trip to Guatemala in June 2021 was ultimately a disgrace; Protesters mocked the VIP by holding signs telling her to go home. Her visit to Honduras was superficial and achieved little. The new president’s husband was ousted there for trying to change the constitution and was rescued from Cuba and Venezuela.
Guatemala’s Giammattei was once Biden’s preferred partner, but relations deteriorated after Biden tried to interfere in the country’s judiciary. In fact, Biden is attacking and harassing the few remaining pro-Western countries in Latin America. He is constantly trying to delegitimize Bukele, who has 87% approval and has coordinated all his decisions with the legislature as a “dictator”, while reassuring the Maduro regime and his counterparts in Cuba and Nicaragua.
In the end, Biden nearly lost Argentina and Brazil, two of Latin America’s leading economic powers, and had to ask them to attend through promising bilateral meetings in the United States, a position that does nothing for America’s image abroad.
As a result of poor governance with key allies in Latin America, Biden is facing a growing border crisis and a complete loss of US influence in the neighborhood – when US foreign policy is already seen as weak and attractive to its key adversaries and agents. instability.
Biden can learn from these catastrophic confrontations, which have left small friendly countries to choose not to deal with America at all, rather than face humiliation, punishment and harassment. He must restore cooperation and coordinate the solution to the security problem before invading crime, terrorism and the overflow of Venezuela’s regional hegemony become irreversible.
Irina Zuckerman is a human rights lawyer and geopolitics and security analyst, CEO of Scarab Rising, a media and security consulting firm, and editor-in-chief of The Washington Outsider.
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