Summit of the Americas | Mexican president boycotts event after Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua excluded

(Los Angeles) Joe Biden saw it as an opportunity to relaunch dialogue with Latin America on crucial topics such as immigration, but his “Summit of the Americas” opened on Monday with a diplomatic mess, the Mexican president deciding to shun the event.

The meeting, supposed to display the exemplary cooperation between the United States and its neighbors, is more likely to highlight all the divisions in a region where American influence is coming up against China more and more frequently.

Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are not invited to the Summit of the Americas, a White House official confirmed to AFP on Monday, because of “reservations” about “the lack of democratic space and respect for the rights humans”.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador had made it known that he would not make the trip under such conditions, and he carried out his threat.

Exclusion

“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,” he said on Monday. He is expected to meet Joe Biden later this summer.

Its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, will represent Mexico, but the absence of Mr. Lopez Obrador will weigh on the scope of the decisions that could be taken at the end of the summit.

The Cuban government, for its part, denounced his exclusion as “undemocratic and arbitrary”.

Another last-minute absentee was Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou, who tested positive for COVID-19.

Immigration

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 arrive in Los Angeles on Wednesday, also hopes to conclude a regional cooperation agreement on immigration, a major domestic political issue in the run-up to the midterm 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.

The absence of the head of state of Mexico, a border country, will be felt with particular acuity, as several thousand migrants set out on Monday in the south of the country with the intention of reaching the United States.

American decline

Washington has ensured the arrival of certain major leaders, both the center-left Argentinian president Alberto Fernandez and the far-right Brazilian head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, with whom Joe Biden has scheduled a bilateral meeting.

Estimating at 23 the number of leaders who will come to Los Angeles, a senior official of the White House estimated that this attendance was “consistent or even higher” than previous editions.

Asked about the fact that the White House excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela because of concerns about democracy, while at the same time the American president evokes a trip to Saudi Arabia, he considered that it was ” a bit like comparing apples to oranges”.

“The summit will have to be judged by the United States’ proposals for trade access, loans and financial assistance,” says Benjamin Gedan, who directs Latin American studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. for Scholars.

“And on these points, the United States will disappoint, it is inevitable,” he believes, at a time when China is investing heavily in the region.

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 is no longer on the rise, neither in the United States nor elsewhere, and in this respect Joe Biden has not basically broken with the protectionist reflexes of his predecessor Donald Trump.

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 have a lot of ‘soft power’”, he observes, that is to say impact in terms of cultural content or consumer habits. But their “political and diplomatic influence is declining every day”.