The Summit of the Americas 2022 has started in the city of Los Angeles with an agenda that is still being polished. For now, the safe topics, beyond the bilateral meetings, are reduced to migration, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and regional inflation.
A couple of seminars on digital journalism are expected to be added, since the United States wants to create a network of digital informants, although no further details are known; and another meeting with private entrepreneurs, according to the State Department.
Among the journalists who have already arrived in Los Angeles, the venue for the meeting, there is a rumor that Cuban private businessmen, activists and independent journalists are among those invited to participate, although the island’s government, how is it knownwas officially excluded from the conclave, along with those from Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The decision, made official only now but already anticipated for weeks, has provoked a wave of reactions and criticism, both from the separate governments and from those of other countries, some of which decided not to participate due to the exclusionary position of the Administration. Biden.
“The real question is why didn’t the Biden administration do its homework?” wondered Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.
Although the White House insists that Biden will outline in Los Angeles his vision for a “sustainable, solid and equitable future” in the hemisphere, Castañeda considered that it is evident, from the last-minute tussles over the guest list, that America Latina is not a priority for the president of the United States.
“This ambitious agenda, nobody knows exactly what it is, beyond a series of trivialities,” he said.
The United States is hosting the summit for the first time since these forums were inaugurated in Miami in 1994, as part of efforts to consolidate support for a free trade agreement that stretched from Alaska to Patagonia and that never came to fruition. In its whole.
That goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid the rise of leftist governments in the region. With the expansion of Chinese influence, most countries have come to expect, and need, less from Washington.
Consequently, the main forum for regional cooperation has languished and has even become a stage for airing historic grievances, as when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez gave US President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Plundering a Continent, during the 2009 summit in Trinidad and Tobago. But the book was in Spanish, a language that the former US president does not speak.
Then, the approach of the United States to Cuba, sealed with the handshake of Obama and Raúl Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, reduced some of the ideological tensions, which are now reborn with the exclusion of the Island along with the Maduro’s Venezuela and Ortega’s Nicaragua.
“It’s a huge missed opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who led the thaw with Cuba from his position as deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration, recently said on his “Pod Save the World” podcast.
“We are isolating ourselves by taking that step because you have Mexico, you have Caribbean countries saying that they are not going to come, something that is only going to make Cuba look stronger than us,” he added.
Cuban government rejects its exclusion from the Summit of the Americas
Parallel activities
On the other hand, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, will participate in a parallel workshop with mayors from throughout the hemisphere that will address social inclusion and the economic contributions of migrants.
In addition, he will lead a dialogue with journalism students on press freedom that will include the launch of a new network for digital communicators from the Americas, highlight the efforts being made to strengthen democratic governance at the Civil Society Forum, and “highlight our shared goals on digital transformation during the Business Summit,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.
At the Americas Youth Forum, Blinken will tour a showcase of entrepreneurs accompanied by young business owners from across the hemisphere.
In this scenario, it was learned that the president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, had suspended his trip to the United States to participate in the summit, after testing positive for COVID-19. The president himself broke the news on Twitter, where he announced that he had to cancel “all activities for the next few days.” His absence then joins the others already announced to the regional forum.
Due to the trip tomorrow to the Summit of the Americas in the US, I had a PCR today. The result of it was that I am positive for COVID 19. As a result of this situation, I must cancel all activities for the next few days.
– Luis Lacalle Pou (@LuisLacallePou) June 6, 2022
Caravan from Mexico
In turn, the start of the summit coincides with a caravan of thousands of undocumented immigrants who left the city of Tapachula, in southern Mexico, on Monday with the intention of reaching the United States.
“I consider that we are walking more than 15,000 human beings,” Luis García Villagrán, coordinator of the NGO Center for Human Dignification that accompanies the migrants, told the AFP agency.
“We tell the leaders of the countries that meet today at the Summit of the Americas that migrant women and children, migrant families, are not currency of exchange, of ideological and political interests,” he added. “We walk for our freedom, because we have the right to migrate,” she said.
America faces its summit with hardly any presidents and with a growing gap
Under persistent rain, the undocumented immigrants began their walk towards the United States, a path of more than 3,000 km, carrying small flags from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Honduras.
“Migrants are not criminals, we are international workers,” said a banner that stood out among the caravan of undocumented migrants.
“Freedom! Freedom!” and “We want visas”, the members chanted as they passed through a police checkpoint.
Omar Herrera, an emigrant from Venezuela, said that he left his job at a university in his country because the salary “is not enough” and now he is willing to do exhausting days of walking in search of a better future.
“Without sacrifice there is no victory,” he concluded.
