US President Joe Biden’s hopes of strengthening ties with Latin America on crucial issues such as immigration were severely dashed on Monday by his Mexican counterpart, who decided to boycott the Summit of the Americas opened in Los Angeles. Angeles to protest against the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
The meeting, supposed to display the exemplary cooperation between the United States and its neighbors, now risks, on the contrary, to highlight all the divisions of a region where American influence in the economic and diplomatic sectors comes up against more and more frequently to China.
Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are not invited to the Summit of the Americas, a White House official confirmed to AFP on Monday, stressing the “reservations” of the United States in the face of “the lack of democratic space and respect of human rights” in these three countries.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had made it known that he would not make the trip under such conditions, and he carried out his threat.
“I’m not going to the summit because we don’t invite all the countries of America. I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries: exclusion,” López Obrador told reporters.
It is its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, who will represent Mexico, but the absence of Mr. López Obrador automatically weighs on the scope of the decisions that could be taken at the end of the summit.
I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries: exclusion.
“Mexico is an important player in the hemisphere. We are very happy that […] Foreign Minister Ebrard be present,” reacted Ned Price, spokesperson for the US State Department.
The Cuban government, for its part, denounced the American decision not to invite him as “undemocratic and arbitrary”.
Another last-minute absentee was Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou, who had to cancel his trip to Los Angeles after being diagnosed with COVID-19. “In view of this situation, I must cancel all my activities in the coming days,” he wrote on Twitter.
Immigration
According to Joe Biden’s main adviser for Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, the American president will use the Summit of the Americas to make announcements on economic cooperation and the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as well as against climate change.
The 79-year-old Democrat, who will travel to Los Angeles on Wednesday, also hopes to conclude a regional cooperation agreement on a politically explosive subject, which has earned him violent criticism from the Republican opposition: immigration, a major political issue. interior in the run-up to the mid-term elections.
The number of people seeking to enter the United States after fleeing poverty and violence in Central America and Haiti is on the rise.
So far, the Biden administration has not kept its promise to carry out a renewed immigration policy, which it wants to be more humane than that of the Trump mandate.
American decline
Washington has ensured the arrival of some major leaders, both the center-left Argentinian president, Alberto Fernandez, and the far-right Brazilian head of state, Jair Bolsonaro.
But the absence of the Mexican president will be perceived as “significant”, according to Benjamin Gedan, who directs studies on Latin America at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The researcher also notes that where China is investing heavily in the region, the American president has not so far announced any substantial economic effort.
“The summit will have to be judged by the yardstick of the United States’ proposals in terms of commercial access, loans and assistance to finance the recovery and infrastructure in the region,” said Benjamin Gedan. “And on these points, the United States will disappoint, it is inevitable,” he believes.
The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 in Miami by President Bill Clinton, who wanted to launch a vast regional trade liberalization agreement.
But free trade no longer has the wind in its sails, neither in the United States nor elsewhere. And in this regard, Joe Biden has not basically broken with the protectionist reflexes of his predecessor Donald Trump.
Eric Farnsworth, vice-president of the Council of the Americas, an organization that promotes trade on the scale of the American continent, recently estimated during a parliamentary hearing that each edition of the Summit of the Americas was “less ambitious” than the previous one. .
Michael Shifter, a researcher at Inter-American Dialogue, sees the controversy over the guest list as a sign of waning US influence.
The United States “still has a lot of soft-power “, he notes, that is to say impact in terms of cultural content or consumption habits. But their “political and diplomatic influence is declining every day”.