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n congruence With his proposal for continental integration without exclusions and the principles of multilateralism, respect for sovereignties and the solution of international differences through dialogue, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warned that he will not attend the Summit of the Americas, It should start next June 6 in Los Angeles, if his US counterpart insists on excluding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from that meeting. The presidents of Bolivia, Luis Arce, and Honduras, Xiomara Castro, supported the decision of the Mexican, while the 14 countries that make up the Caribbean Community (Caricom) made a similar announcement. With deplorable ambiguity, Argentine President Alberto Fernández urged Washington to include the three governments he considers undemocratic
, but confirmed his determination to attend that truncated meeting. Jair Bolsonaro will not go, although for other reasons, and Daniel Ortega had already stated that he would not attend.
It seems unlikely that other nations will refrain from going to Los Angeles to protest the aforementioned exclusion. But it is clear that, unless Joe Biden changes his mind and ends up accepting the presence of the Summit of the Americas, it will be a failure: the continent has 35 countries and Biden wanted to bring together the heads of state and government of 32 of them; the way things are going, he will barely manage to get 14 guests to come, for a total of 15, if he counts himself; he will have something like a little less than half a summit and a little more than half a ministerial meeting. If the Democrat intended to recover the ground that the United States lost in the hemisphere in the four years of Donald Trump, and if he intended to use the photo of some thirty presidents as electoral ammunition for the ailing Democratic Party ahead of the legislative elections next November , you will have already been able to realize that he got a couple of shots in the foot.
It is astonishing, to say the least, that Biden made such a miscalculation and acted in disregard of one of the core principles of multilateralism. When the UN was founded in 1945, no one thought of marginalizing Belarus because it was governed by a single party, Great Britain because it was a bourgeois democracy, Belgium because it was a monarchy, or the Dominican Republic because it was under the very dictatorial hooves of Leónidas Trujillo. The exclusionary argument that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are dictatorships or non-democratic countries is not only highly debatable –Venezuela conducts more free electoral processes than the United States itself–, but also a misguided unilateralism. The truth is that the man who sleeps in the White House did not want to have in his meeting rulers against whom he has maintained incessant and unjustified hostility, that he wanted to avoid the risk of being thrown in his face and that he intended to avoid a broadside of the American extreme right, similar to the shouting that the vernacular extreme right has armed in Mexico when López Obrador has included Miguel Díaz-Canel or Nicolás Maduro among his guests.
On the other hand, it seems that Biden did not calculate the new regional leadership of Mexico or the continental projection of the Fourth Transformation, or else he thought that in López Obrador he would find an accommodating ruler willing to keep his principles if they bothered the powerful neighbor to the north. . And for flirting with his feared Republicans – that is the only way to explain the infamous continuation of the blockade against Cuba and even the Trumpist accents in anti-Cuban hostility – the Democrat, who also arrived tired and challenged for the presidency and who lacks projection in Latin America, it has been deprived of the convening power it requires to carry out a spectacular act of continental unity like the one it proposed to carry out in Los Angeles, and which has been reduced to a summit of some Americas.
For the Mexican government, the balance is not bad: certainly the opportunity to present the Obradorista proposal for American trade integration is lost, but it would have been a perfect inconsistency to take it to a sectarian and exclusive meeting. Other spaces will be opened to promote the initiative. For the rest, Mexico is projected as the undisputed counterweight to Washington’s always hegemonic desires and as the defender of the right to self-determination and respect for sovereignties.
Will the episode have negative consequences on the bilateral relationship? Hardly: despite the efforts of the United States to intervene, economic ties are running harmoniously and fruitfully for both countries, there is fluid communication between the National Palace and the White House, even on the most thorny issues, and Washington is clear that on its border South America has a trustworthy, bona fide partner with whom you know where you stand.
Twitter: @Navigations
