The Summit of Disunity: Chronicle of an Foretold Failure

The Summit of Disunity: Chronicle of an Foretold Failure
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13 June 2022
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Classified by some as the Summit of Absences due to being marked since before its beginning by the U.S. veto of the participation of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the IX Summit of the Americas, which recently ended in Los Angeles, it was an epic failure for its organizers.

Supposedly assembled to unite the countries that have historically formed Washington's backyard, the IX Summit demonstrated, in addition to the great differences the continent suffers in terms of strategic and multilateral integration, the lack of leadership that the United States holds in the region. .

As reported by EFE agency:

«The IX Summit of the Americas was one more stone in the American history of regional division, in which groups, commissions or organizations custom-made to the ideological directions of the moment have been created over and over again, making it impossible for America to adapt and adopt the already inescapable global geopolitics of the great allies».

Proof of the latter was that during the meeting Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and El Salvador asked to restructure institutions that were designed for integration, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), about which President Fernández did not hesitate in requesting a change in its leadership, referring to his secretary general Luis Almagro.

For Jason Marczak, an expert on Latin America from the Atlantic Council think tank, quoted by AFP, these comments "express frustration with the inter-American system" and the need for it "to be renewed to be even more efficient in responding to priority issues in the Americas today that are very different from what they were decades ago.”

In an opinion article published in the Chinese press, the executive director of the Latin American Law Institute of the University of Political Science and Law of China, Pan Deng, considers that the U.S. intended to "divide the Americas by ideology", but he didn’t expect the rejection of different governments. Now, Latin American countries "dare to challenge" Washington and "this undoubtedly reflects the continuous decline" of its hegemony and "foresees the death sentence for the attempts of the Biden Administration to divide the world by ideologies and promote bloc confrontation.

At the same time, the Summit exposed the hypocritical contradictions of Biden who, while excluding Latin American "dictators" from the Summit, his national security team was preparing for a possible visit to Saudi Arabia, an oil kingdom that the president himself had called a "pariah"' in the early days of his campaign.

How can the president argue principle as a reason to disdain "dictators" in his backyard when he plans on meeting Saudi officials who have performed mass arrests and ghastly violence to crush dissent? someone wonder on anonymity at the White House with the visit to the Middle East.

As Robert Guttman, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, rightly put it in another comment posted on this site, America's inconsistency boils down to "cynical" self-interest.

In an odd interview offered to EFE at the end of the Summit by Juan González, President Joe Biden's main adviser for Latin America, he tried to justify the exclusion of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua with the existence of an agreement reached by the OAS in 2001 where it established that only countries that were in favor of the Democratic Charter could be invited.

Agreement that during the government of President Obama, of which Biden was vice president, was -apparently, according to Gonzalez-, flagrantly violated during the VII Summit of the Americas that was held in Panama, in 2015, with the presence of the Cuban president Raul Castro at the time.

In reality, the recently finished summit has little to do with the U.S. defense of democracy, nor human rights, nor with other OAS agreements, nor with integration and, much less, with the prosperity of the peoples of Latin America.

The Summit of the Americas only helped President Joe Biden to express loud and clear that "illegal migration is unacceptable," one of the main problems of current U.S. domestic politics. It does not take an expert to realize that, at this point in history, no amount of contributions can make disappear the inequality caused by the plunder to which, for centuries, the United States has subjected its neighbors south of Rio Grande.

In the same page, appears the exclusion of the supposed dictatorial countries that, despite their absence, ended up stealing the Los Angeles show: another stunt of the Democratic administration to please the Trumpist hosts of Florida with a eyes on the legislative elections of 2022 and his re-election in 2024.

To the failures of the disastrous extraction of the U.S. army from Afghanistan, the impotence in the face of mass shootings and the inflationary situation caused by the sanctions imposed by the United States in its indirect war against Russia, President Biden now puts on top of that the Summit of the Latin American disunity.

No wonder, and according to anonymous sources quoted by The New York Times, even his own supporters are skeptical of a new candidacy for the current president.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff

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