Biden officials saw no good options on who to invite leading up to Americas summit
Biden administration officials found themselves at a loss in the days leading up to this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
President Joe Biden had hoped the event — hosted by the United States for the first time since the inaugural summit in Miami in 1994 — would serve as a turning point in a regional effort to stem a surge of migration to the U.S. southern border.
But several strategically critical countries through which migrants flow — Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico — vowed to protest the summit by not sending their heads of state if the administration chose to exclude the autocratic regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, themselves the source of large outflows of migrants to the United States.
On Sunday, following what U.S. sources acknowledged was a heated debate that lasted until just hours before the summit began, the president drew what the White House called a “principled” line in the sand against inviting dictators to a gathering that also put democracy promotion at the heart of its agenda. Biden, according to a source familiar with the matter, told aides that moral consistency compelled him to reject foreign pressures to invite authoritarians.
The absence of foreign leaders from countries so critical to the migration crisis lowers the prospects of a breakthrough agreement this week out of California. But a “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration” negotiated in the weeks leading up to the summit, committing nations throughout the region to cooperate more fully on migration control, will still include some significant commitments, U.S. officials said.
“There will be a declaration made public Friday” on migration, said Oscar Chacón, co-founder and executive director of Alianza Americas, a coalition of migrant-led groups in over a dozen states. “It will basically echo the same stuff that we have already been listening to, namely that we need more cooperation by governments in the region.
“But for as long as we completely miss the conversation and the action to tackle what it is that’s triggering people to feel forced to migrate, this will be basically a declaration that will take us nowhere,” he added.
AVOIDING PREDICTABLE CONTROVERSY
Four U.S. officials working on the summit described to McClatchy a tortured decision-making process.
Biden had made clear to his aides that the attendance of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was a top personal priority. Yet administration
officials knew the president would incur intense blowback at home if he, at López Obrador’s insistence, invited representatives of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — diplomatic gestures that would cause a domestic political firestorm just as White House aides are scrambling to revive his slumping poll numbers.
Compounding matters, Department of Homeland Security officials have warned for months that increasing migration flows from Cuba and Venezuela are especially hard to handle, as the U.S. does not maintain diplomatic relations with either country.
The president and his aides ultimately settled on the path of least political resistance: a slimmeddown, less ambitious summit that would avoid predictable controversies at home and keep the president’s sense of a foreign policy doctrine intact.
“In the end, the president decided — and very much made this point in all of the engagements that we had — that the best use of this summit is to bring together countries that share a set of democratic principles,” a senior administration official said. “We feel very comfortable with the approach we are taking.”
But while the administration ruled out inviting representatives of the Venezuelan regime, led by Nicolás Maduro, it debated inviting Cuban and Nicaraguan officials up until the end.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been trying to negotiate a path forward with his Mexican counterpart, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, for several weeks, a State Department spokesman told reporters.
López Obrador announced he would not attend the summit on Monday after U.S. officials confirmed that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua would not be invited. Ebrard will attend in his place.
“We were in discussions with our Western Hemispheric neighbors until very recent hours,” said State Department spokesperson Ned Price. “I think it is unfortunately notable that
one of the key elements of this summit is democratic governance. And these three countries are not exemplars, to put it mildly, of democratic governance.”
The president will still join heads of state in attendance on Friday to sign a migration declaration, “sending a strong signal of unity and resolve to bring the regional migration crisis under control,” said Juan Gonzalez, director of Western Hemisphere policy at the White House.
PACT IN PROGRESS
The administration has been working with Latin American and Caribbean nations on a pact that would provide additional financial support to countries facing increased migration flows and improving communication to control surges, according to an administration official, who said that the government of Mexico was actively engaged in crafting the Los Angeles declaration in recent weeks.
Chacón said he does not believe the absence of the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other governments at the summit “changes in any fundamental way the essential effort the U.S. has been driving the past several months.”
But a more ambitious deal to curb new sources of migration now seems unlikely.
“The U.S. government has been actually negotiating way in advance to this summit, bilaterally with each of these governments and several other governments in Latin America,” Chacón said. “The essence of the U.S. negotiations revolve around how can these governments become more engaged, finding a way of containing migration and keeping people from reaching the U.S. southern border.
“To the extent that those agreements have been actually negotiated ahead of the summit, bilaterally with each of these governments, I do not believe that it will really change much of anything,” Chacón said.