Above Photo: The people want an inclusive Summit of the Americas.
The summit convening in Los Angeles next week is yet another proof of the authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the elites that rule the United States. The exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from the meeting from the outset confirms this. This is an extremely serious fact, which leads to other very serious exclusions as well.The United States has disregarded the consensus of non-exclusion that had been reached, when Cuba had already participated in the VII and VIII versions of the Summit of the Americas in Panama and Lima after a general clamor of the governments and peoples of the region. This means that Washington does not understand, or does not want to realize, that the era of neo-liberal hegemony, when it could make and break countries and governments as it pleased, is over. Nor can it stand the fact that the peoples’ rejection of neo-liberalism and a clear trend towards the election of progressive governments, that are now present in Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Chile and knocking on the door in Colombia with Petro, winning the first round, and in Brazil with Lula, whom all the poll have already declared him as the absolute winner, are once again gaining strength -as in the late 1990s and late 2000s- but now with more depth. Of course, to this must be added Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and the 6 brave Eastern Caribbean States that are part of ALBA, all of which share many ideas and foreign policy projections with the above mentioned and are now displaying a clear and accurate view of the current world at the IX ALBA Summit.
Another serious anti-democratic action of the Biden administration is that it did not ask the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean what issues they were interested in discussing at the meeting. With their usual arrogance and, as proof that the ghost of James Monroe still guides the actions of the State Department and the White House, they claimed the right, which no one has granted them, to decide the topics and, if anything, to pretend to consult the drafts with some of the governments they liked. On top of not having asked for the criteria of the other countries in due time, they are now running against the clock, trying to repair the irreparable.
Media leaks and a document published on May 24 by the US Congressional Research Service reveal some of the issues that the US intends to discuss at the meeting. Illegal migration is at the top of the list, together with border control, analysis of its causes, co-responsibility in the matter, etc. All of this is highly debatable and suspect since it is the policies of the United States and the submissive local oligarchies that are the major causes of migration in the region, starting with their dozens of military interventions since the 19th century, added to the imposition -sometimes invasion by the Marines- of bloody military dictatorships, then the national security doctrine and the Condor Plan, without forgetting the Central American wars of the 1980s and finally their strangling neo-liberal policies. Almost all of them are the cause of Mesoamerican migration.
How does Washington intend to discuss illegal migration if Cuba and Venezuela don’t get to participate in the discussion? After all the migratory flows of these countries have been deliberately provoked by its criminal blockade policy of the US, which in the case of Cuba has gone on for six decades and taken to savage extremes of cruelty and in both cases all of this was maintained during the pandemic.
According to its organizers, the summit proposes actions that “dramatically improve pandemic response and resilience, promote a green and equitable recovery, bold, strong and inclusive democracies and address the root causes of irregular migration”. Honestly, how can we all not laugh out loud? How long has the empire been concerned about solving our problems? If it were not outrageous, it would also be laughable to pretend a serious debate on the response to the pandemic that does not take into account Cuba, the only third world country that created its own vaccines and with the disease under total control thanks to having immunized 96 percent of its population. Add to this the sending of 5,000 of its doctors to support other countries against covid. And if you need one more laugh all of this mentoring they propose is from the country who completely botched the covid response and continues to as cases dramatically climb in the US; the country who lost 1 million people to the disease, many of them preventable.
The U.S. says nothing about who will provide the funds to achieve these lofty wonders either. It is worth mentioning that Mexican President López Obrador has reminded Washington of its failure to comply with the miserly 4 billion promised to contain migration in Central America with social programs, while in a jiffy Biden and Congress approved a whopping 40 billion dollars for weapons in Ukraine.
The extremely dangerous conflict against Russia, the no less dangerous hegemonic dispute with China, the control of our region with docile governments and the November elections seem to be the only thing that really worries the faltering Biden administration.