The moment arrive. The IX Summit of the Americas begins this Monday in Los Angeles, California, without the assistance of representatives of the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
The regional forum will end on June 10. From the perspective of Nicaragua, analysts have great expectations with the forum and hope that it will issue a joint pronouncement on governments classified as “dictatorships.”
However, analysts and opponents consulted by the voice of america They maintain that the polarization seen before the Summit in aspects such as participation could diminish the possibility of a transcendent declaration.
Oppositionist Ana Quiroz, who belongs to the Blue and White National Unity group (Unab), maintains that what could actually be obtained “is political support for the demands that are being made” from Nicaragua.
“Really our expectations are moderate in the sense that we do not believe that there will be big declarations about the situation in Nicaragua, it is even possible that it will not appear in the final declaration of the summit,” Quiroz tells the VOA.
A group of opponents of said organization will be in the parallel events that will take place at the summit. One of them is Julio Ricardo Hernández, who also belongs to the Blue and White National Unit.
Hernández says they are “afraid that the word Nicaragua does not even appear in the final declaration of the presidents of the Summit”, due to the position of some countries.
“Due to pressure from those countries and because of trying to win broad consensus, it is very likely that the final declaration of the Summit will not include Nicaragua,” Hernández stressed.
However, he mentions that there are other spaces within the event in which they intend to “carry the voice of the Nicaraguan exile” through human rights activists, environmentalists and critics of President Daniel Ortega.
The former Costa Rican president, Laura Chinchilla, who will participate in one of the forums of the Summit of the Americas, is also not very optimistic about the results that come out of the event, as she points out that there are “ideological discrepancies” that have been “disappointing” for the region hit by the pandemic and indirectly by the crisis in Ukraine.
“I don’t have high expectations about this summit. Of the many that I have had to see and participate in, I feel that it is the one that is reached in the worst conditions of intra-regional political dialogue and this is discouraging,” said the former president in the weekly program Tonight, founded by the exiled journalist, Carlos Fernando Chamorro.
Chinchilla points out that it is something tragic for the region because this should be a moment in which the rulers could put discrepancies aside “and understand that as never before the region requires collective reinforcement because we are in a critical situation due to the crisis of the pandemic and today we are receiving negative consequences of the war in Ukraine”, he warns.
On behalf of Nicaragua, who was not invited to the Summit, President Daniel Ortega He said that he had no intention of going either. to the meeting that catalogs as a colony of the United States.
“We have to make ourselves respected, we cannot be asking the Yankee, begging him that we want to go to his Summit. His summit does not stimulate us,” argued Ortega, who instead joined the Alba Summit virtually, held days ago in Cuba.
What has been the recent background of Nicaragua in the Summit?
Since the return to power of Daniel Ortega, the president attended the V Summit of the Americas that took place in 2009, in Trinidad and Tobago.
Then at the VI Summit of the Americas held in Colombia in 2012, Ortega did not attend in protest along with Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela for the exclusion of Cuba.
“At the end of the day, it is not a favor that is being done to Cuba, but a snatched right that is being recognized for Cuba,” said Ortega, who was absent in Cartagena in support of the island.
Later in 2015, Ortega attended the forum accompanied by his wife Rosario Murillo and Jose Adam Aguerri president of the private sector at the time. Today Aguerri is in prison.
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