President Alberto Fernández affirmed that “it is time for the United States to turn its gaze towards Latin America,” and assured that his words at the IX Summit of the Americas constituted “a speech against the foreign policy” followed by the government of former president Donald Trump.
“It was an anti-foreign policy speech by (Donald) Trump. Now President (Joe) Biden today has a duty to review that and correct things. Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, who opened a door to end the blockade with Cuba. The embassies were replaced again. My complaint was the damage that the Trump administration has done to Latin America,” Fernández said in an interview he offered to the CNN en Español television network in the city of Los Angeles, where this meeting.
The president considered that “the Summit of the Americas is not a social meeting that authorizes a certain right of admission to those who organize it,” and thus criticized the decision made by the United States to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from the conclave.
“The truth is that I wanted to say this because there are two countries in Latin America that are suffering. One is Cuba, which has been under a blockade for decades that began in the Cold War. All this seems very far away. How can it be that we are discussing this? recent form, which is the blockade on Venezuela, which has condemned many Venezuelans to exile and which has divided society,” said the head of state.
In this regard, he clarified: “I did not speak about Nicaragua, I spoke about Cuba and Venezuela. In recent years, Venezuela has done important work to restore dialogue with the opposition, to carry out clean elections, which have been held. There have been elections in different states, Chavismo lost the state where Chavez was born and no one questioned or challenged that election.”
Meanwhile, Fernández described Biden’s speech as extraordinary” because “it is wonderful to hear a president of the United States say that the spill theory cannot continue to be trusted.”
“And to hear something else: that this policy that Biden applies in the United States wants it to transcend the United States and be applied on the continent. That is wonderful,” he assessed.
The Argentine head of state also stated that the United States is “a very important country that has had to face many difficulties.”
“Like all of us, it faced the pandemic; it faced the Afghanistan problem; and now it has to face the Russia-Ukraine problem. What I am saying is that it is time for the United States to turn its gaze to Latin America and fundamentally end these two restrictions that it imposed (on Cuba and Venezuela), which seem to me profoundly unfair and not at all humanitarian,” he considered.
Regarding the invitation to Biden to attend the Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), in December in Buenos Aires, Fernández said that the US president “was very happy with the invitation”
“I think that once and for all we can take the transcendent step of respecting each other in diversity, because we don’t all think the same in Latin America, but nevertheless we can get together and unite to solve problems,” he summarized.
In this sense, the president indicated that the region “realized that the disunity among Latin Americans allowed terrible things, for example the problems that were generated with the search for vaccines when Covid was getting worse.”
“It is time for us to unite and it is time for us to respect each other because each people elects the president they want. I have a splendid relationship with President (Ecuadorian Guillermo) Lasso, despite the fact that everyone knows of my friendship with Rafael Correa,” stressed.
In relation to the resignation of Matías Kulfas from the Ministry of Productive Development after the dissemination of an off that originated in that ministry and that questioned aspects of the government’s energy policy, the president indicated that the former official “was wrong.”
“Yes, he was wrong because it seems to me that in a government it doesn’t make sense for issues that could affect officials to be raised off-screen. I think Matías was wrong, he was a great minister. I was never willing to tolerate that and I don’t tolerate it, even when I lose a great minister like he has been,” he said.
Regarding his relationship with the vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Fernández acknowledged that “he basically has some differences and nothing more.”
“What happens is that this becomes a topic of permanent journalistic debate that, for me, has more significance in the journalistic than in the political sphere. We do not have the traumatic relationship that the media occupy and pose,” he assured.
