President Biden, don’t cave to Mexico’s demand to invite dictators to your summit
Fresh from an official visit to Cuba, Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has said that he probably won’t attend the June 6 Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles unless the Biden administration invites Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. But Biden should not cave in to this extortion.
Instead, Biden should effectively tell his Mexican counterpart, “If you want to side with these dictatorships instead of with their victims, you are welcome to stay at home.”
Lopez Obrador, after returning from his trip to Cuba and calling the island’s dictator “an extraordinary president,” told reporters on Tuesday that if the Biden administration maintains its stated intention to exclude Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from the summit, he would send his foreign minister in his place.
The Mexican president said that “nobody should be excluded from any meeting” of regional heads of state. He conveniently failed to mention that under a rule approved at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec, Canada, any unconstitutional break of democratic rule in the region is an “insurmountable obstacle to the participation of that state’s government in the Summit of the Americas.”
And Lopez Obrador also conveniently failed to mention that
Mexico routinely attends several regional summits — such as the CELAC community of nations — that exclude the United States and Canada.
But nobody should be surprised that Lopez Obrador is stepping up his leftist rhetoric as he comes closer to the end of his six-year term in 2024. Mexico is not doing well, and he is seeking to shift attention away from his country’s bad economic and social news.
Mexico’s economy is growing at a paltry 2% a year, far behind the 4% annual rates that he promised at the start of his term.
Inflation is at 7.5%, its highest level in more than 20 years. Poverty has grown by at least 3.8 million since Lopez Obrador took office, and homicide rates remain at more than 33,000 a year. And Lopez Obrador’s government has been tainted by several corruption scandals, including one involving his son.
During his two-day trip to Cuba, Lopez Obrador announced that his government will hire 500 Cuban doctors to work in Mexico, drawing angry reactions from Mexico’s health professionals’ associations. Human rights groups denounced Cuba’s missions of doctors abroad as amounting to modern slavery, because the Cuban regime pays the doctors only a small fraction of what it gets for their work.
Lopez Obrador also announced after his trip that he will buy Cuban COVID-19 vaccines for children, despite the fact that Cuba’s vaccines have not been approved by the World Health Organization.
By getting closer to Cuba’s regime — even after its brutal repression of last year’s historic protests on the island — and demanding that Biden invite
Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to the summit, Lopez Obrador may be trying to create artificial confrontations to divert public attention from much more serious issues.
Biden should keep this in mind, and shrug off Lopez Obrador’s threat not to show up at the summit.
“What Lopez Obrador is doing is blatant extortion,” says Jose Miguel Vivanco, the former head of the Human Rights Watch advocacy group’s Americas department. “He knows that the Biden administration needs him to help stop migration at the southern border, and he’s taking advantage of that.”
But Biden will do the right thing if he sticks to his decision not to invite Latin America’s dictators to the summit. Inviting them would not only run against the Summit’s goal of strengthening democracy in the region, but would amount to rewarding repression.
So, President Biden, don’t worry about Lopez Obrador’s threat not to come. In fact, it may be better for him not to attend, than for him to show up, make a big fuss about the absence of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and try to undermine efforts to strengthen trade and democracy in the region.
Even if it turned out to be a smaller summit, you should proudly stress the meeting’s prodemocracy goals, and tell Lopez Obrador, “No problem, see you next time.” And once you hang up, you should turn around and tell your advisors, “Good riddance!”