04/06/2022 Share From June 6 to 10, the Summit of the Americas will be held in Los Angeles. This forum, established in 1994, is the only international meeting dedicated to addressing Western Hemisphere issues.
At the first summit, held in Miami (1994), the countries of Latin America pushed a very aggressive agenda of free trade in exchange for foreign debt, migration, institutions, and other beauties. There was only one absentee, Cuba, a country that the host Bill Clinton did not want to invite.
By 2005, the ideological winds had changed in Latin America and free trade or privatization were terms of unpleasant memory. It seemed that the raison d'être of the summits had ended since the United States did not want to discuss with Latin America and the Caribbean what these countries wanted to raise.
At the 2009 summit, held in Trinidad and Tobago, a young president, Barak Obama, arrived with more promises than concrete results, and he was so friendly that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave him a copy of the book The Open Veins of Latin America, by the Uruguayan Edward Galeano.
In 2015, at the summit held in Panama, the Americanist ideal was realized: all 34 countries of the American continent were present, including Cuba represented by Raúl Castro. There were photos of Obama and Castro, a famous handshake, and a hope that we would all enter the 21st century.
Instead, the 2018 summit in Peru was a catastrophe, as exclusion returned, Latin American countries were divided over recognition of the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela, and then-US President Donald Trump did not even attend. Had he been reelected, the Summit of the Americas would possibly not exist.
Now it's up to President Joe Biden to host the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. President Biden had done very well in recent months with the multilateral summits of the G-7, the NATO Summit, the Climate Summit, and the plurality of summits of leaders to address the response to the war in Ukraine.
In early May, President Biden visited various allies in Asia to articulate a nelson key against China, but all this was forgotten by the successive shootings of schools, hospitals, and all kinds of commercial establishments in the United States.
Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (all these nations under dictatorial regimes) were not invited to the summit that begins on Monday. Bolivia is not going either. As if that were not enough, the leaders of Guatemala, Mexico, and the 13 nations of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have given signs that their leaders will not attend, but that they will send lower-level delegations. For Jair Bolsonaro to be there President Biden had to offer him a high-level bilateral meeting. It is unknown what was offered to Canada and the other 12 countries that have committed to sending their leaders.
The United States wants to use the summit to mitigate the migration crisis and thus begin to distribute migrants. Spain, a country that does not belong to this continent, was invited so that, among other things, it would commit to taking away a few migrants stuck on the border between Mexico and the United States.
By forcing a summit in the midst of an electoral process as delicate as the one President Biden faces in November a historic moment is being wasted and diplomacy has been allowed to be hijacked by interest groups. President Biden could postpone the summit to 2023, or do as Clinton did, holding it in December 1994, a month after the midterm elections.
An anecdote I was told in university halls in the United States was that, during the Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s, the State Department summoned all Latin American ambassadors accredited to the Organization of American States to the White House. The session was intended to present an initiative from the United States for all Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina, to become one. As great deference, the new resulting country could choose its capital, its currency, its new flag and everything else. The astonished Latin American ambassadors left in silence, at that moment they understood that their neighbor to the north did not understand them.
Opportunity knocks
Now with this mini-summit, President Biden can take the opportunity to listen and think big. He can propose the cancellation of the foreign debt of those countries that offer to fight climate change and corruption. Deals can be made for food security, clean energy, ecotourism, and disease prevention.
A regional framework can be created to eliminate impunity in high-profile corruption cases and serious crimes. You can also demilitarize the war on drugs and propose the decriminalization of narcotics to use the Dutch model.
So many things can be done, but it is necessary to recover that spirit of hope for shared prosperity and a common future, which existed at the Panama summit in 2015. Otherwise,
Rodrigo Noriega La Prensa.
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