LOS ANGELES (AP) – When leaders gather at the America’s summit this week, the focus is likely to shift from political issues – migration, climate change and galloping inflation – and instead shift to something Hollywood is thriving on. : the drama of the red carpet.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed on Monday that he would not appear, striking at an event hosted by US President Joe Biden.
Lopez Obrador said worries about the guest list made him miss it. He wanted Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to be invited, but Washington did not want to include autocratic governments. Other leaders also said they would stand aside if not everyone was invited.
Experts say the event could be a disgrace to US President Joe Biden.
Even some progressive Democrats have criticized the administration for succumbing to pressure from exiles in Florida and banning communist Cuba, which has attended the last two summits.
“The real question is why the Biden administration hasn’t done its homework,” said Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.
While the Biden administration insists the Los Angeles president will outline a vision of a “sustainable, sustainable and fair future” for the hemisphere, Castaneda said it was clear from last-minute disputes over the guest list that Latin America was not a priority for the President of the United States.
“This ambitious agenda, no one knows exactly what it is, except a series of bromides,” he said.
The United States hosted the Miami summit for the first time since its launch in 1994 as part of efforts to boost support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.
But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid rising left-wing politics in the region. As China’s influence expands, most nations have begun to expect – and need – less from Washington.
As a result, the main forum for regional co-operation has stalled, sometimes turning into a stage for historical complaints, such as the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez at a 2009 summit in Trinidad and Tobago giving President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic treatise, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Plundering a Continent.
The US opening to Cuba’s former Cold War adversary, backed by Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 Panama summit, has eased some of the ideological tensions.
“This is a huge missed opportunity,” said Ben Rhodes, who recently led the thaw in Cuba as the Obama administration’s deputy national security adviser, in his podcast Pod Save the World. “We are isolating ourselves by taking this step because you have Mexico, you have Caribbean countries that say they will not come – which will only make Cuba look stronger than us.
To increase turnout and prevent failure, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been on the phone in recent days, talking to the leaders of Argentina and Honduras, both of whom initially voiced support for a proposed boycott from Mexico. Former Senator Christopher Dodd crossed the region as a special adviser to the summit in the process, persuading far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and never spoke to Biden, to be late in confirming his attendance.
Ironically, the decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela was not just a whim of the United States. The governments of the region in 2001 in Quebec City declared that any disruption of the democratic order was an “insurmountable obstacle” to future participation in the summit.
The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are not even active members of the Washington-based Organization of American States, which is organizing the summit.
“This should have been a topic of discussion from the beginning,” said Tom Shannon, a former deputy secretary of state for political affairs who has attended several summits over his long diplomatic career. “This is not a US imposition. It was by mutual consent. If leaders want to change that, then we need to have a conversation first. “
Instead of going to the summit, Lopez Obrador said he would visit communities affected by Hurricane Agatha last week. His foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, will lead the Mexican delegation in his absence. He said he had sent a message to Biden that he would like to visit him at the White House when his schedule allowed him to discuss the integration of North and South America.
“There can be no summit if all countries are not invited,” Lopez Obrador said on Monday. “Or there may be one, but that is to continue with the whole policy of interventionism.”
After the last summit in Peru in 2018, which Trump did not even bother to attend, many predicted that there was no future for the regional summit.
Only 17 of the region’s 35 heads of state were present in response to Trump’s withdrawal. Few see value in bringing together leaders for photos from such diverse locations as aided Haiti, industrial power plants in Mexico and Brazil, and violent Central America – each with its own unique challenges and bilateral agenda with Washington.
“Until we speak with one voice, no one will listen to us,” said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also blamed Mexico and Brazil, the region’s two economic powers, for the current hemisphere shift. relationships. “With a cacophony of voices, it’s much harder to find our place in the world.”
To the surprise of many, the United States took the ball in early 2019, offering to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was enjoying a renaissance of leadership in Latin America, albeit among mostly conservative governments with similar views on the narrow issue of restoring democracy in Venezuela.
But that goodwill fell apart when Trump proposed the idea of invading Venezuela to remove Nicolas Maduro, a threat reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Cold War. The pandemic then struck, devastating human and economic consequences for a region that accounts for more than a quarter of COVID-19 deaths worldwide, even though it makes up only 8% of the population. Politics in the region have been reversed.
The election of Biden, Obama’s chief executive for Latin America and with decades of practical experience in the region since serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised expectations for renewal.
But as popular alarm spread during the pandemic, the Biden administration slowed to coincide with Russian and Chinese vaccination diplomacy, although it eventually provided 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also maintains restrictions on migration from the Trump era, reinforcing the view that he is neglecting his own neighbors.
Since then, Biden’s distinctive policy in the region – a $ 4 billion aid package to attack the root causes of migration in Central America – has stalled in Congress with no visible effort to revive it. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also diverted attention from the region, something experts say could return to Biden if rising US interest rates trigger a capital flight and debt default in emerging markets.
There were also minor disregards: when left millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president of Chile, raising high expectations for a generational change in politics in the region, the US delegation was led by Isabel’s second-lowest cabinet leader. Guzman, head of the small business administration.
Shannon said that for the summit to be successful, Biden should not try to set out a big American vision of the hemisphere, but rather show sensitivity to the region’s embrace of other global powers, concerns about yawning inequality and traditional distrust of USA
“More than speeches, he will have to listen,” Shannon said.
___
AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington; Daniel Politie in Buenos Aires, Argentina; David Biller in Rio de Janeiro and Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this report.
___
Goodman announced from Miami.
Add Comment