[ Criticisms of the United States and OAS underlined the need to
revive regional integration initiatives independent of U.S.
influence.]
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SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS UNDERLINES WIDESPREAD DISCONTENT WITH U.S.
POLICY  
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Alexander Main
June 16, 2022
NACLA Reports
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_ Criticisms of the United States and OAS underlined the need to
revive regional integration initiatives independent of U.S. influence.
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Official photo of Summit of the Americas 2022 , ( Alan Santos/PR,
Palacio de Planalto, Wikimedia Commons)

 

Long before it even began on June 6, this year’s Summit of the
Americas, held in downtown Los Angeles, was widely expected to be a
flop. And indeed it was. As many media outlets predicted, the
controversy surrounding the U.S. government’s decision to exclude
Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the invitee list ended up
overshadowing the summit’s mostly dull proceedings.

Several heads of state—including Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador of
Mexico—boycotted the summit because of the U.S. decision, and many
other regional leaders began their speeches by criticizing the
exclusions. Though Biden’s team managed to cobble together a weak
regional migration agreement and attempted to awe their Latin American
and Caribbean audience with a grand sounding “Americas Partnership
for Economic Prosperity,” the summit will almost certainly be
remembered primarily for the unhappy reactions to Biden’s
blacklisting of the three U.S. adversaries.

Yet focusing on the response to these exclusions, as most of the media
has done, provides us with a limited understanding of the general
malaise that plagued the summit. Indeed, the U.S. decision to freeze
out the three governments, previously labeled the “troika of tyranny
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by former Trump advisor John Bolton, was but a symptom of a far bigger
issue, one that many leaders touched on during the summit: the
continuation, under Biden, of Trump’s destructive and deeply
unpopular policies.

Presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers from at least a
dozen countries slammed the United States’ unilateral exclusion of
Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, while only the outgoing right-wing
president of Colombia publicly defended the decision. But many of
these leaders used their brief time at the podium to express
additional grievances related to other unilateral U.S. policies.

A number of heads of government and foreign ministers strongly
criticized U.S. unilateral economic sanctions, or “blockades,”
targeting Cuba and Venezuela. Belize’s prime minister, Johnny
Briceño, who currently chairs the CARICOM group of 15 Caribbean
countries, was passionate in his condemnation. “The illegal blockade
against Cuba is an affront to humanity,” he said
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un-American.” Mexico’s foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard noted
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“It’s incredible that at this stage we continue to see blockades,
embargoes, and sanctions, even during the pandemic, against countries
of the Americas, in violation of international law.”

The denunciations of Briceño, Ebrard, and other speakers were
reminiscent of the 2012 Summit of the Americas
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Cartagena, Colombia, when many of the region’s leaders excoriated
President Obama for both vetoing Cuba’s participation in the summit
and for carrying on with the Cold War-era embargo against Cuba. Obama,
to his credit, got the message: he allowed Cuban president Raúl
Castro to participate in the next summit and, more importantly, he
began a process of normalization of relations
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Cuba and took significant measures to ease U.S. sanctions against the
country. These moves helped improve U.S. relations with the many Latin
American governments that had lost faith in Obama following his
administration’s role in helping a 2009 military coup in Honduras
succeed
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It appeared that U.S-Latin America policy was moving in a better
direction.

President Trump reversed
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Cuba policy and expanded and hardened U.S. sanctions against the
island far beyond the measures in place prior to Obama’s reforms.
Guided by the hawkish Florida Senator Marco Rubio, he also implemented
a disastrous set of “maximum pressure” policies targeting
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government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These included draconian
economic sanctions that greatly exacerbated
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economic crisis in Venezuela, contributing to widespread malnutrition
and poverty and causing tens of thousands of deaths. Then, starting in
2019, the Trump administration attempted to forcibly remove the Maduro
government by recognizing a parallel government, led by hard right
legislator Juan Guaidó, and publicly encouraging a military coup
against Maduro, while at the same time threatening a U.S. military
invasion.

When Biden took office in early 2021, there was hope
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would quickly annul many of Trump’s executive actions and, with
regard to Cuba and Venezuela policy, revert to the status quo ante of
the Obama years. But, despite repeated pleas from governments in the
region, from U.S. members of Congress
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and even from Venezuelan opposition figures
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Biden has largely maintained Trump’s crushing sanctions on both
countries. In the weeks prior to the summit, the White House announced
a few half-measures designed to ease these sanctions, very slightly.
If the goal was to mollify the region’s governments ahead of the
summit, it does not seem to have worked.

Another major grievance raised by a number of the summit’s attendees
was the role that the Organization of American States (OAS) played
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the 2019 coup in Bolivia, an issue that has also been raised
repeatedly by progressives in the U.S. Congress. “Interventions like
those that took place in Bolivia are not helpful for the promotion of
democracy,” said Honduran foreign minister
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Enrique Reina, in a barely veiled reference to the OAS actions that
paved the way for the coup. By promoting false claims of fraud
following the country’s presidential elections that year, OAS
officials stoked a major political crisis that resulted in the forced
removal of elected president Evo Morales under pressure by the
country’s military. The far-right de facto regime that then seized
power
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political opponents and massacred dozens of indigenous protesters.

Argentina’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, was less diplomatic
than his Honduran counterpart. “The OAS lost its legitimacy,” he
said
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“The OAS must never again legitimize destabilization processes, it
must not be involved in a coup as recently happened in Bolivia.”
Mexico’s Ebrard also brought up
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shameful role that the OAS recently played in the coup in Bolivia.”
And a young activist directly confronted Luis Almagro, secretary
general of the OAS, at a side event on media freedom. “Luis Almagro,
you have blood on your hands,” he yelled
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shortly before being removed by security guards. “Because of your
lies there was a coup in Bolivia. A coup against the democratically
elected government. And that dictatorship, that you helped install,
massacred 36 people,” he shouted, referring to the Indigenous
protesters who were gunned down by security forces in two
separate massacres
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as documented by an independent group of international experts backed
by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The secretary general went further than supporting the false fraud
narrative that formed the pretext for the coup in Bolivia: he also
quickly recognized the ultra-conservative coup government, blamed
Morales for perpetrating a “self-coup,” and then kept silent as
the coup authorities committed massacres and persecuted their
opponents. All of this scored him more points with foreign policy
hardliners in the Trump administration, like Trump’s neoconservative
national security advisor John Bolton and the anti-Castro
activist Mauricio Claver-Carone
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also held a position in the National Security Council.

Almagro had already gained the admiration of these and other hawks in
Washington when, early on in his tenure at the OAS
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he abandoned all pretense of neutrality and became an avid backer of a
strident far-right agenda in the region. He had called for military
intervention in Venezuela in 2019 and had warmly supported
Honduras’s notoriously corrupt and autocratic right-wing president,
Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2020 he was called out by regional human
rights groups for firing the executive secretary of the IACHR not long
after the Commission had denounced the violent post-coup repression in
Bolivia.

Hope for change at the OAS was in the air when Biden and his team took
power. If any government could reign in Almagro’s right-wing
activism, or even have him removed in light of his misconduct, the new
U.S. administration—the OAS’s main funder—could. Instead,
however, the U.S. acting representative to the OAS, Bradley Freden,
has continued throwing his full support behind Almagro. Freden also
has pointedly endorsed the OAS’s Big Lie regarding the Bolivian 2019
election, including at an August 2021 extraordinary OAS session in
which he referred to
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remarkable work of the OAS electoral observation mission in
Bolivia.”

Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has also had a warm
relationship with Almagro. At the summit he referred
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the secretary general as “my friend” and—seemingly oblivious to
the increasingly intense criticism of Almagro coming from other OAS
members—said “it’s wonderful to be working with you as
always.” In the same breath, he spoke of addressing “the pressing
challenges that we face in our hemisphere” including “threats to
democracy and human rights.”

But much of the region has had enough of endless lectures on human
rights and democracy from the Biden administration, while being
subjected to the same inhumane, destructive policies that were
implemented under Trump—including sanctions that make the United
States, by far, the biggest violator of human rights in the region.
Protests nearby, organized by a “People’s Summit
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convened by social justice organizations, regularly reminded Los
Angeles and the world of this fact, with huge banners with a call to
“End all U.S. Blockades and Sanctions.” 

Inside the Intercontinental Hotel, where the exclusionary summit was
being held, the speeches were largely diplomatic but still sent a
clear message to the United States. Clearest, perhaps, was the speech
by Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández, which contained a long
litany of complaints about U.S. policy and the OAS. “President
Biden, it is time to open up in a fraternal way to favor our common
interests,” Fernández said
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reaching the crescendo of his address. “The years prior to your
arrival in the U.S. government were marked by an immensely damaging
policy for our region deployed by the administration that preceded
you. It is time for those policies to change and the damage to be
repaired.”

It is unlikely that the message of Fernández and other regional
leaders hit home. Biden and his team seemed more concerned with
placating Cuban-American hardliners in Congress and in South Florida
than in genuinely listening to the rest of the hemisphere.

And so, the Biden administration ignored the many complaints voiced
during the summit, and carried on with its agenda, focused largely on
presenting its half-baked “Americas Partnership for Economic
Prosperity
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latest hollow re-purposing of Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress.”
Little is yet known about this grand regional plan, but it appears to
seek to counter China’s trade and investment in the region (which
now significantly surpasses that of the United States) through
“public-private partnerships,” the beefing up the of
Inter-American Development Bank’s private sector lending arm, and
fresh bilateral trade negotiations with countries that already have
free trade agreements with the United States. Just what the doctor
ordered: another big neoliberal program for Latin America, though far
less ambitious than Clinton and Bush’s failed Free Trade Area of the
Americas.

In the end, though, the 9th edition of the Summit of the Americas may
well have achieved one significant thing: convincing many Latin
American and Caribbean governments that the only viable way forward is
to re-invigorate regional groups like the Community of Latin American
and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations
(UNASUR), or to come up with a new regional integration
scheme—without any involvement of the United States.

_Alexander Main is director of international policy at the Center for
Economic and Policy Research and a member of NACLA's editorial
committee._

_The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an
independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and
critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military
intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and
media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the
nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from
oppression, injustice, and economic and political subordination._

_Our mission is guided by our organizational values. NACLA offers a
forum for debate among a range of voices and perspectives on the Left.
As we enter our sixth decade, we maintain an editorial focus on issues
related to political economy, race and indigeneity, gender/sexuality,
and climate and the environment. NACLA also provides a platform for
voices from the region, and has made a commitment to emphasize Black,
Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQI+, and feminist perspectives._

_For more about NACLA and our work, read our history
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* Summit of the Americas
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* OAS
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* Sanctions
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