The United States, host of the IX Summit of the Americas in June, reiterated Thursday that respect for democracy is a “condition” for participating in the meeting. This statement comes when the presidents of Mexico and Bolivia made their assistance conditional on there being no exclusions.
The head of US diplomacy for the Americas, Brian Nichols, said at an event in Washington that since the first hemispheric summit, held in Miami in 1994, the strengthening of democracy has been a central theme, reaffirmed when the Inter-American Democratic Charter.
At the Third Summit in Quebec, he said, “the region’s leaders defended strict respect for democracy as an essential condition for participation in all future summits.”
“Since then, any unconstitutionality or alteration or interruption of the democratic order has represented an obstacle to participation in the summit,” he stressed when speaking at the 52nd conference on the Americas organized by Ascoa, a US business forum.
Nichols declared last week that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela “do not respect” the Inter-American Democratic Charter “and therefore” does not expect them to be present at the next hemispheric summit to be held June 6-10 in Los Angeles.
“It is a decision of the president, but I think he has been very clear that countries that do not respect democracy due to their actions will not receive invitations,” Nichols said in an interview on TV.
Nichols did not mention Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela on Thursday, countries that the United States considers governed by authoritarian regimes that violate human rights and individual freedoms.
Nor did he allude to the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who recently announced that he will not attend the IX Summit “unless everyone is invited.”
«I do not want the same policy to continue in America, and I want, in fact, to assert independence and sovereignty and demonstrate for universal brotherhood. We are not for confrontation, we are for brotherhood », he told reporters.
Last Wednesday, the president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, took the same position, stating that “a Summit of the Americas that excludes American countries will not be a full Summit of the Americas.”
Leaders of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have also called for an “inclusive and non-exclusive” IX Summit.
In addition, representatives of the Caribbean countries have indicated their disagreement with the eventual representation of Venezuela in Los Angeles by the opposition leader Juan Guaidó, whom the United States and several American nations consider Venezuelan interim president by not recognizing the re-election of Nicolás Maduro in 2018.
