The emphasis of this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles is expected to turn away from common policy problems – migration, climate change, and soaring inflation — and toward something Hollywood thrives on: the red carpet drama.
Experts predict the gathering might turn into an embarrassment for US President Joe Biden, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leading a list of leaders threatening to stay home in protest of the US’ exclusion of authoritarian leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Even some progressive Democrats have chastised the administration for caving in to pressure from exiles in Florida’s swing state and banning communist Cuba from the last two summits.
“The real issue is why the Biden administration didn’t do its research,” said Jorge Castaeda, a former Mexican foreign minister and current New York University professor.
While the Biden administration claims the president will lay out his vision for a “sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere in Los Angeles, Castaeda believes it is clear from the last-minute wrangling over the guest list that Latin America is not a top priority for the US president.
“No one understands precisely what this ambitious objective is, other than a succession of bromides,” he remarked.
For the first time since its inception in 1994, the United States is hosting the summit in Miami, as part of a push to rally support for a free trade pact spanning Alaska to Patagonia.
However, due to a surge in communist politics in the area, that aim was abandoned more than 15 years ago. With China’s growing power, most countries have grown to expect — and need — less from the United States. As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has slowed, at times devolving into a platform for airing historical grievances, such as when late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presented President Barack Obama with a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tract “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago.
Some of the ideological tensions were eased by the United States’ openness to erstwhile Cold War opponent Cuba, which was formalized by Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama.
“It’s a massive squandered opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who managed the Obama administration’s Cuba thaw as deputy national security adviser, recently remarked on his “Pod Save the World” podcast. “By taking that step, we’re isolating ourselves because you’ve got Mexico and Caribbean nations saying they’re not coming — which would just make Cuba appear stronger than us.”
To boost attendance and avoid a failure, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been on the phone with the presidents of Argentina and Honduras in recent days, both of which originally indicated sympathy for Mexico’s planned boycott. Former Senator Christopher Dodd has also crisscrossed the area as a special advisor for the meeting, persuading far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has never talked to Biden, to belatedly confirm his presence.
Ironically, the United States did not make the choice to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on its own. In 2001, the governments of the area stated in Quebec City that any breach of democratic order would be a “insurmountable hurdle” to future participation in the summit process.
The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela aren’t even members of the Organization of American States, which hosts the summit in Washington.
“This should’ve been a conversation issue from the start,” said former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon, who attended multiple summits throughout his lengthy diplomatic career. “It’s not a U.S. mandate.” It was a mutual agreement. If leaders wish to alter it, we need first have a discussion.”
Many expected that the regional meeting had no future after the previous summit in Peru in 2018, which President Trump didn’t even bother to attend. Only 17 of the region’s 35 leaders of state participated in reaction to Trump’s unprecedented withdrawal. Few saw the purpose in gathering leaders from such disparate locales as aid-dependent Haiti, industrial powerhouses Mexico and Brazil, and violence-plagued Central America together for a photo op — each with its own distinct difficulties and bilateral agenda with Washington.
“No one will listen to us as long as we don’t speak with a single voice,” said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also blamed the region’s two economic powerhouse, Mexico and Brazil, for the present hemispheric drift. “It’s much more difficult to identify our position in the world when there’s a cacophony of voices.”
To many people’s astonishment, the United States took up the ball in early 2019 and offered to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was experiencing a leadership rebirth in Latin America, although centered on the limited topic of restoring democracy in Venezuela, among primarily like-minded conservative regimes.
But Trump’s goodwill faded when he suggested invading Venezuela to depose Nicolás Maduro, a threat reminiscent of the Cold War’s worst excesses. Then the epidemic struck, wreaking havoc on an area that accounted for more than a quarter of all COVID-19 fatalities worldwide although accounting for just 8% of the population. The politics of the area were thrown into disarray.
The election of Biden, who served as Obama’s point man for Latin America and had decades of expertise in the area as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised hopes for a restart. However, as public fear grew throughout the epidemic, the Biden administration was sluggish to match Russia and China’s vaccine diplomacy, although finally providing 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also upheld Trump-era immigration restrictions, furthering the perception that the country was abandoning its own citizens.
Since then, Biden’s signature program in the area — a $4 billion assistance plan aimed at addressing the core causes of migration in Central America — has languished in Congress, with little sign of reviving it. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also drawn attention away from the area, which analysts believe might backfire on Biden if increasing interest rates in the United States cause a wave of capital outflows and debt defaults in developing countries.
There have been smaller snubs as well: when leftist millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president of Chile, raising hopes for a generational shift in the region’s politics, the US delegation to his inauguration was led by Small Business Administrator Isabel Guzman, the second-lowest ranking Cabinet member.
Shannon believes that in order for the summit to be successful, Biden should avoid laying out a great American vision for the hemisphere and instead demonstrate sensitivity to the region’s acceptance of other global powers, worries about widening inequality, and longstanding skepticism of the United States.
“More than speeches, he’ll have to listen,” Shannon adds.