From Washington, D.C.
A key week begins for the Government of Joe Biden in matters of foreign policy. This Monday, in the city of Los Angeles Californiarepresentatives of civil society, the private sector and the governments of the continent will meet within the framework of the IX Summit of the Americas. Not all: there is no invitation from the United States for the presidents of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Luis Arce from Bolivia said that he will not go. The final list of attendees is not known, although there are still hours before the leaders of the region begin to land on the sunny west coast of the North American country.
The main absence could be that of the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who announced that he will not attend if not all the countries of the region are summoned. The United States excludes Daniel Ortega, Nicolás Maduro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, leaders of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba respectively, from the meeting, considering them non-democratic. Over the last week, the White House hinted that it was having “final considerations” on the guest list and said it would be announced “soon,” but as of kick-off, there was still no news.
A count by the Council of the Americas also has the attendance of the heads of state of the so-called Northern Triangle written in pencil: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The three countries are indicated in the policy of migration of Washington as the issuers of people who cross Mexico and arrive at the border with the United States. A possible absence of the leaders of these countries, added to that of López Obrador, would be directly detrimental to the objectives of the White House regarding this summit, in which it intends to reach a new migration agreement for the region.
Last week, Biden’s top adviser for Latin America, Juan González, said in a call with reporters that the US president “personally wants” López Obrador to be at the summit.
Immigration, diversity and DD.HH.
This new edition of the regional forum, the second that the United States has organized since the summit of 1994 in Miami, It will have three parallel discussion spaces. The first will be the forum of civil society organizations, which begins this Monday and will focus on issues of immigration, diversity and human rights. There will also be a meeting of the private sector, in which the debate will go through the economic recovery after the crisis caused by the covid pandemic and the technological transformation of the region. For the third forum, youth are invited in a hybrid format to discuss climate change, corruption and connectivity.
The eyes will be set, above all, on the leaders meeting. The summit, for the host country, will be above all a thermometer that will allow it to estimate what real influence it currently has on the continent. Nowhere on the known agenda is there any mention of China, the elephant in the region. However, competition with the Asian giant is one of the main concerns of the White House.
For the heads of state of Latin America and the Caribbean, it will be more of an evaluation. In the four years of presidency of Donald Trump, Washington’s foreign policy towards America was limited above all to opposition against Cuba and Venezuela and to promoting a wall on the border with Mexico. The former president even missed the previous Summit of the Americas, which took place in Peru in 2018. Instead, he sent his deputy, Mike Pence.
Biden’s arrival in office in January 2021 raised expectations in a region that had felt ignored for the previous four years. The Democrat, with a long history in American politics, could spark a new relationship. But now, a year and a half into office, he has little to show for it on that front. Under his administration, the United States’ focus was primarily on recovering from the pandemic, which caused more than a million deaths in the North American country. He is, abroad, focused on Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, to see what Russia does.
This new edition of the Summit of the Americas that begins this Monday comes to show Biden the true state of the relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean. To the rest, she will let them see how much Washington is willing to do if she wants to compete with China in the region.