Unless Biden gets serious now, the Summit of the Americas he’s hosting will be a fiasco
Commend President Biden for planning to host the ninth Summit of the Americas — the top hemisphere-wide presidential meeting — in June, after former President Trump arrogantly snubbed the last such meeting four years ago.
But Biden will have to work hard to prevent this summit — scheduled for the week of June 6 in Los Angeles — from becoming a big fiasco, because, among other things, U.S. influence in the region has been rapidly declining over the past five years.
The Summit of the Americas has been held every three or four years since it was first held in Miami in 1994. This will be the second time that it will take place in the United States.
It’s an important event, because it’s a rare occasion during which U.S. presidents are forced to pay attention to Latin America, even if it’s only for a few months before the meeting. Trump was the only U.S. president who failed to attend, sending his vice president instead.
Still, I’m worried that the Biden administration is setting in motion its bureaucratic engines too late to take full advantage of this opportunity to counter China’s massive inroads into the region and to forge closer ties with willing Latin American nations.
Serious preparations for the meeting, which should have started months ago, are just beginning. Several senior Latin American diplomats tell me that they have not yet been contacted by the U.S. government about the summit.
“The timing is very tight, and it’s going to be extremely difficult in terms of having a process of consultation with all the relevant stakeholders,” says Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington D.C.
To make things worse, the United States doesn’t even have an ambassador to the 34-member Organization of American States. Traditionally, the U.S. ambassador to the OAS has been a key U.S. official in preparations for the Summit of the Americas.
The Biden administration’s nominee, Frank Mora — a Miami-based Florida International University professor — was coronavirus infection, both during the time delta was dominant and also when omicron was taking over.
Those two articles were published online by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. nominated in July, but has not yet been confirmed by the Senate.
“It’s shameful that, six months later, we still don’t have an ambassador to the OAS,” Shifter told me. “We’re saying that we’re going to help Latin American countries make their governments more efficient, and we can’t even appoint our own ambassador to the OAS.”
Unlike in the 1994 summit in Miami, when the United States launched an ambitious proposal to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, this time there seem to be no bold U.S. proposals for hemispheric integration.
And the political climate across the hemisphere could hardly be worse.
The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the region’s economies, China is rapidly becoming a key economic power, and antiAmerican dictatorships or
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the third study, also led by CDC researchers. It looked at people who tested positive for COVID-19 from Dec. 10 to Jan. 1 at more than 4,600 testing sites across
Amarket-skeptic left-ofcenter governments are ruling in many countries in the region.
In addition, the United States will have a hard time trying to lead by example, because its own democracy is teetering after Trump’s refusal to recognize his loss in the 2020 elections.
By many standards, several Latin American countries are more democratic than the United States, in the sense that their recently defeated presidential candidates have not tried to subvert election results, like
Trump has done — and continues to do.
Biden could still turn the summit into a success. He struck the right note at his Jan. 19 press conference, when he said that Latin America “is not America’s back yard” but “America’s front yard.”
That’s true: Whether it’s the U.S.
Three shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were about 67% effective against omicron-related symptomatic disease compared with unvaccinated people. Two doses, however, offered no significant trade, jobs, immigration, the environment, or drug trafficking, no region in the world affects Americans’ daily lives more directly than Latin America.
Biden should appoint a top-level official to take charge of the summit. And he should order that person to draw up concrete proposals for greater hemispheric cooperation in the fight against COVID-19, help re-direct some multinational companies’ supply chains from China to Latin America and increase technology, cultural and student exchanges with the region.
For instance, the United States could offer free virtual degree and nondegree academic programs for millions of Latin American students.
But to do all of that, Biden must move quickly. Time is running out, and there are few signs that Washington is coming up with bold plans to improve people’s lives throughout the hemisphere.
Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. Sundays on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera protection against omicron, the researchers found.
“It really shows the importance of getting a booster dose,” said the CDC’s Emma Accorsi, one of the study’s authors.