Joe Biden’s Summit of the Americas kicks off on a bad note with boycott of Mexico

The President of Mexico announced on Monday that he would not participate in the Summit of the Americas, organized by Joe Biden and which begins today in Los Angeles, to protest against the American decision to exclude Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua . Will the Summit of the Americas, supposed to inaugurate a new era in relations between the United States and Latin America, be a missed opportunity? After weeks of suspense, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador , finally carried out his threat and announced that he would not participate in the diplomatic event organized by Joe Biden, which begins Monday in Los Angeles. “I am not going to the summit because we do not invite all the country of America. I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries: exclusion,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador told the press. invited to the Summit of the Americas, a White House official confirmed to AFP on Monday, stressing the “reservations” of the United States in the face of “the lack of democratic space and respect for human rights” in these three countries. .Leaders from across the region, however, are expected for a week of schooling. hanges, Washington wishing to show the muscles against China, which advances its pawns in an area long considered by the Americans as their backyard. A “safe” and “democratic” regionJoe Biden’s main adviser for Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, told the press that the American president intended to “promote a vision of a safe” and “democratic” region, which “is basically in the strategic interest of the United States”.Joe Biden will, according to him, to make announcements on economic cooperation and the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic as well as against climate change. The 79-year-old Democrat also hopes to conclude a regional cooperation agreement on a politically explosive subject, and which has earned him violent criticism of the Republican opposition: immigration. The number of people seeking to enter the United States after fleeing poverty and violence in Central America and Haiti is on the rise. The Biden administration has, until ‘here , not kept its promise to lead a renewed immigration policy, which it wants to be more humane than that of the Trump mandate. Chinese competition Washington has ensured the arrival of certain major leaders, both the center-left Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, than Brazil’s far-right head of state, Jair Bolsonaro. for Scholars. His boycott threat had already caused “a truly unwelcome twist during the preparation for the summit, because it mobilized an enormous amount of American diplomatic energy”, he notes. Very popular in his country, Andrés Manuel López Obrador indicated that he could meet, in July at the White House, President Joe Biden, with whom he claims to get along very well. Benjamin Gedan also notes that, where China invests heavily t in the region, the American president has so far not announced any substantial economic effort. assistance to finance recovery and infrastructure in the region,” said Benjamin Gedan. “And on these points, the United States will inevitably disappoint,” he believes. Political influence at half mast The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 in Miami by President Bill Clinton, who wanted to launch regional trade liberalization agreement. predecessor Donald Trump.Eric Farnsworth, vice-president of the Council of the Americas (“Council of the Americas”, an organization which promotes commercial exchanges on the scale of the American continent) recently estimated, during a parliamentary hearing, that each edition of the Summit of the Americas was “less ambitious” than the previous one. Michael Shifter, a researcher at Inter-American Dialogue, sees the controversy over the guest list as an indication of the declining influence of the United States. Especially since the political difficulties of Joe Biden, unpopular and who risks losing control of Congress after elections this fall, do not escape the leaders of the region. The United States “still have a lot of ‘soft power'”, he observes, that is to say impact in terms of cultural content or consumer habits. But their “political and diplomatic influence is falling every day”. With AFP