Not often a topic dominates the headlines in almost all (Latin) American countries. Usually, local media are preoccupied with domestic troubles and each country fluctuates slightly differently on the waves of the international economic and geopolitical cycle. But in recent weeks, columns from Chilean to Mexican media have heard that one question: ‘Are we going?’
“No,” said left-wing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Monday morning. He did not travel to Los Angeles this week for the ninth Summit of the Americas. “I’m not going because not all the countries of the Americas are invited,” he is quoted as saying by the Mexican news site Animal Politico†
Lost chance
This year, US President Joe Biden will host the meeting of American countries. It is the second time the summit has been held in the United States since the very first in 1994 in Miami. Following Donald Trump’s America First policy, the conference seemed like a great opportunity for Biden to show new leadership in the region. But he seems to have already lost that opportunity, several Latin American presidents are boycotting his summit.
It’s time to change that “age-old politics of exclusion, of domination,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said. Which was the case: Nicaragua and Venezuela were not welcome and the Americans delayed a possible invitation to Cuba. The repressive presidents Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela) have no business at a summit that hopes to promote democracy, the US believes.
Typical example of American imperialism, the Cuban government wrote on its own news channel Granma† Never mind that invitation, President Díaz-Canel said, despite the recent tentative rapprochement between Washington and Havana. Cuba has fluctuated in its state media between pretended indifference and outrage – we don’t want to be at your party at all and, moreover, the arrogance of not inviting us!
Sweet revenge
That last emotion, that of sweet revenge, predominated on the website of Granma† The Americans had misjudged the support Cuba enjoys in Latin America, the editorial said. “The US tried to force its hostile policy towards Cuba on the Western Hemisphere as if it were consensus, but the debate over the invitations shows the opposite.”
Indeed, it must have been an unpleasant surprise to Biden that several presidents tossed his invitation in the trash. The recently inaugurated left-wing president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, also missed the summit. “If we’re not all there, it won’t be a Summit of the Americas,” Castro tweeted in May. She sent her foreign minister, the Honduran newspaper reported. La Prensa this week. And Luis Arce, Bolivia’s socialist president, also stayed at home.
Gabriel Boric, Chile’s new 36-year-old left-wing president, went but promised to crack critical notes in Los Angeles, Chile’s news site reported La Tercera† “By excluding countries, the US only strengthens them in their own position.”
Expectations about the summit were already low in American media. With the resignation of the Mexican president, the chance of a breakthrough in an important theme such as migration seems small. “Mexico’s absence underscores the idea that Latin America is adrift and that Washington has no answer,” Mexico expert Tony Payan said in a statement. The New York Times†
Joost de Vries is a correspondent in Mexico City.