Mexico president to skip Americas Summit in LA
US defends decision to omit Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela
LOS ANGELES — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed Monday that he will skip the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, dealing a blow to U.S. efforts to rally governments to work together to address surging migration in the hemisphere.
Lopez Obrador had been leading a chorus of mostly leftist leaders pushing the U.S. to invite Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the gathering taking place on U.S. soil for the first time since 1994.
Other leaders, including from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — three big drivers of migration to the U.S. — have indicated they’ll stay away too.
“There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” Lopez Obrador said Monday, indicating that Mexico would instead be represented by his foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, “Or there can be one, but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.”
The White House defended its decision to exclude certain countries, while also confirming Lopez Obrador will visit Washington in July to meet with Biden.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there was “candid engagement” with the Mexican leader about the summit.
“We do not believe that dictators should be invited,” Jean-Pierre said.
With so many no-shows, critics say the event risks turning into an embarrassment for President Joe Biden, who has struggled to reassert U.S. leadership in a region where mistrust of the U.S. runs deep and China has been made major inroads the past two decades. U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by wars in the Middle East and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Even some leaders who are attending drew differences with the U.S.
“In respect to Cuba we have always been there to support and defend human rights,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in Ottawa at a news conference with visiting Chilean President Gabriel Boric. “We’ve also pushed for greater democracy. Canada has always had a different position on Cuba than the United States.”
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is a strong critic of the Cuban government, applauded the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and he took a swipe at Lopez Obrador, saying his decision to skip Los Angeles would set back bilateral relations.
Menendez said the Mexican leader was siding with “dictators and despots over representing the interests of the Mexican people in a summit with his partners from across the hemisphere.”
The Biden administration said it would not include autocratic governments that jail opponents and rig elections, pointing to a declaration from the 2001 summit in Quebec City, when the region’s governments committed to barring any government that breaks with democratic order from future gatherings.
However, many critics, including some progressive Democrats, have criticized the administration for bowing to pressure from exiles in the swing state of Florida to bar communist Cuba, which attended the last two summits.
Adding to the sense of last-minute improvisation, Biden since taking office has reversed many of the Trump-era policies tightening a decades-old U.S. embargo on Cuba. He also sent a senior level delegation to meet with Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro to offer possible relief from crippling oil sanctions in exchange for a commitment to resume negotiations with the U.S.-backed opposition.
The Summit of the Americas was launched by President Bill Clinton as part of an effort to galvanize support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Argentina.
But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid a rise in leftist politics in the region.
With China’s influence expanding, most nations have come to expect — and need — less from Washington.
As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has languished, at times turning into a stage for airing historical grievances, like when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tract, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”
The U.S. opening to former Cold War adversary Cuba, which was sealed with Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, lowered some of the ideological tensions.