Summit of the Americas is a gathering of leaders in Los Angeles. The focus will shift from common policy changes, such as migration, climate change, and galloping inflation, to something Hollywood loves: the drama of the red-carpet.
Experts say that the Mexican President Andres Manuel Obrador is among the leaders who have threatened to return home to protest the U.S. exclusion of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban leaders. Some progressive Democrats criticize the administration for bowing down to exiles from Florida and banning communist Cuba. They attended the previous two summits.
Jorge Castaneda (a former Mexican foreign minister, now an instructor at New York University) said that “The real question here is why the Biden government didn’t do their homework.”
Castaneda stated that while the Biden administration insists that the president in Los Angeles will present his vision for a sustainable, resilient, and fair future for the hemisphere’s, it is clear from last-minute wrangling about the guest list, that Latin America is not a priority of the U.S. president.
He said, “This ambitious agenda, nobody knows exactly what it’s about, except a series bromides.”
As part of an effort for support for a free trade deal stretching from Alaska to Patagonia, the U.S. will host the summit in Miami for the first time since 1994.
However, this goal was abandoned 15 years ago due to a rise of leftist politics within the region. Most countries have grown to expect and require less from Washington, as China’s influence has increased. The premier forum for regional cooperation has slowed down, sometimes becoming a platform for voicing historical grievances. For example, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s late leader, gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tract “The Open Veins of Latin America – Five Centuries of a Pillage of a Continent.”
Some of the ideological tensions were eased by the U.S. opening to Cuba, an ex-cold war adversary. This was done with Obama’s handshake at the 2015 summit in Panama.
“It’s a huge miss opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor under President Obama, stated recently in his podcast “Pod Save The World”. “We are isolating ourself by taking that step because Mexico and the Caribbean countries say they won’t come — which will only make Cuba seem stronger than we.”
Biden and Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris, have been calling the leaders of Argentina, Honduras and Honduras in recent days to boost turnout and avoid a flop. Former Senator Christopher Dodd also traveled across the region to serve as a special advisor for the summit. He convinced far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to confirm his attendance, despite being a loyal ally of Trump.
