Biden scrambles to avoid Americas Summit flop in Los Angeles
INVITED BUT WILL NOT ATTEND
AMLO AND BIDEN
AMLO AND BIDEN
NOT INVITED
Cuba ALBA SummitVenezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, left, and Cuba's President Miguel Diaz Canel, flash V-signs as they pose for a group photo during the XXI ALBA Summit at the Palace of the Revolution, in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 27, 2022. (Yamil Lage/Pool Photo via AP)Less
ELLIOT SPAGAT, JOSHUA GOODMAN and CHRIS MEGERIAN
Sun, June 5, 2022, 8:03 AM·6 min read
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When leaders gather this week in Los Angeles at the Summit of the Americas, the focus is likely to veer from common policy changes — migration, climate change and galloping inflation — and instead shift to something Hollywood thrives on: the drama of the red carpet.
With Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador topping a list of leaders threatening to stay home to protest the U.S.’ exclusion of authoritarian leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, experts say the event could turn into a embarrassment for U.S. President Joe Biden. Even some progressive Democrats have criticized the administration for bowing to pressure from exiles in the swing state of Florida and barring communist Cuba, which attended the last two summits.
“The real question is why the Biden administration didn’t do its homework,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.
While the Biden administration insists the president in Los Angeles will outline his vision for a "sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere, Castañeda said it's clear from the last-minute wrangling over the guest list that Latin America is not a priority for the U.S. president.
“This ambitious agenda, no one knows exactly what it is, other than a series of bromides," he said.
The U.S. is hosting the summit for the first time since its launch in 1994, in Miami, as part of an effort to galvanize support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.
But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid a rise in leftist politics in the region. With China's influence expanding, most nations have come to expect — and need — less from Washington. As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has languished, at times turning into a stage for airing historical grievances, like when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's classic tract, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”
The U.S. opening to former Cold War adversary Cuba, which was sealed with Obama's handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, lowered some of the ideological tensions.
“It’s a huge missed opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who led the Cuba thaw as deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, said recently in his “Pod Save the World” podcast. “We are isolating ourselves by taking that step because you’ve got Mexico, you’ve got Caribbean countries saying they’re not going to come — which is only going to make Cuba look stronger than us.”
To bolster turnout and avert a flop, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been working the phones in recent days, speaking with the leaders of Argentina and Honduras, both of whom initially expressed support for Mexico's proposed boycott. Former Senator Christopher Dodd has also crisscrossed the region as a special adviser for the summit, in the process convincing far right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was a staunch ally of Trump but hasn't once spoken to Biden, to belatedly confirm his attendance.
Ironically, the decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela wasn't the whim of the U.S. alone. The region's governments in 2001, in Quebec City, declared that any break with democratic order is an “insurmountable obstacle” to future participation in the summit process.
The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela aren’t even active members of the Washington-based Organization of the American States, which organizes the summit.
“This should’ve been a talking point from the beginning,” said former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon, who in a long diplomatic career attended several summits. “It’s not a U.S. imposition. It was consensual. If leaders want to change that, then we should have a conversation first.”
After the last summit in Peru, in 2018, which President Trump didn't even bother to attend, many predicted there was no future for the regional gathering. In response to Trump's historic pullout, only 17 of the region's 35 heads of state attended. Few saw value in bringing together for a photo op leaders from such dissimilar places as aid-dependent Haiti, industrial powerhouses Mexico and Brazil and violence-plagued Central America — each with their own unique challenges and bilateral agenda with Washington.
“As long as we don’t speak with a single voice, no one is going to listen to us," said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also faults Mexico and Brazil — the region's two economic powers — for the current drift in hemispheric relations. "With a cacophony of voices, it is much more difficult to find our place in the world."
To the surprise of many, the U.S. in early 2019 picked up the ball, offering to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was enjoying something of a leadership renaissance in Latin America, albeit among mostly similar-minded conservative governments around the narrow issue of restoring democracy in Venezuela.
But that goodwill unraveled as Trump floated the idea of invading Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro — a threat recalling the worst excesses of the Cold War. Then the pandemic hit, taking a devastating human and economic toll on a region that accounted for more than a quarter of the world's COVID-19 deaths despite making up only 8% of the population. The region's politics were upended.
The election of Biden, who was Obama's point man for Latin America and had decades of hands-on experience in the region from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set expectations for a relaunch. But as popular angst spread during the pandemic, the Biden administration was slow to match the vaccine diplomacy of Russia and China, although it did eventually provide 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also maintained the Trump-era restrictions on migration, reinforcing the view that it was neglecting its own neighbors.
Since then, Biden's hallmark policy in the region — a $4 billion aid package to attack the root causes of migration in Central America — has stalled in Congress with no apparent effort to revive it. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also diverted attention away from the region, something experts say could come back to bite Biden if rising interest rates in the U.S. trigger a stampede of capital outflows and debt defaults in emerging markets.
There have been smaller snubs too: When leftist millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president in Chile, setting high expectations for a generational shift in the region's politics, the U.S. delegation to his inauguration was led by the second-lowest ranking Cabinet member, Small Business Administrator Isabel Guzman.
Shannon said for the summit to be successful Biden shouldn’t try to lay out a grand American vision for the hemisphere but rather show sensitivity to the region’s embrace of other global powers, concerns about gaping inequality and traditional mistrust of the U.S.
“More than speeches," says Shannon, “”he will need to listen.”
___
AP Writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Daniel Politi in Buenos Aires, David Biller in Rio de Janeiro and Gonzalo Solano in Quito contributed to this report.
___
Goodman reported from Miami.
Cuba ALBA SummitVenezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, left, and Cuba's President Miguel Diaz Canel, flash V-signs as they pose for a group photo during the XXI ALBA Summit at the Palace of the Revolution, in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 27, 2022. (Yamil Lage/Pool Photo via AP)Less
ELLIOT SPAGAT, JOSHUA GOODMAN and CHRIS MEGERIAN
Sun, June 5, 2022, 8:03 AM·6 min read
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When leaders gather this week in Los Angeles at the Summit of the Americas, the focus is likely to veer from common policy changes — migration, climate change and galloping inflation — and instead shift to something Hollywood thrives on: the drama of the red carpet.
With Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador topping a list of leaders threatening to stay home to protest the U.S.’ exclusion of authoritarian leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, experts say the event could turn into a embarrassment for U.S. President Joe Biden. Even some progressive Democrats have criticized the administration for bowing to pressure from exiles in the swing state of Florida and barring communist Cuba, which attended the last two summits.
“The real question is why the Biden administration didn’t do its homework,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who now teaches at New York University.
While the Biden administration insists the president in Los Angeles will outline his vision for a "sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere, Castañeda said it's clear from the last-minute wrangling over the guest list that Latin America is not a priority for the U.S. president.
“This ambitious agenda, no one knows exactly what it is, other than a series of bromides," he said.
The U.S. is hosting the summit for the first time since its launch in 1994, in Miami, as part of an effort to galvanize support for a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.
But that goal was abandoned more than 15 years ago amid a rise in leftist politics in the region. With China's influence expanding, most nations have come to expect — and need — less from Washington. As a result, the premier forum for regional cooperation has languished, at times turning into a stage for airing historical grievances, like when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez at the 2009 summit in Trinidad & Tobago gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's classic tract, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”
The U.S. opening to former Cold War adversary Cuba, which was sealed with Obama's handshake with Raul Castro at the 2015 summit in Panama, lowered some of the ideological tensions.
“It’s a huge missed opportunity,” Ben Rhodes, who led the Cuba thaw as deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, said recently in his “Pod Save the World” podcast. “We are isolating ourselves by taking that step because you’ve got Mexico, you’ve got Caribbean countries saying they’re not going to come — which is only going to make Cuba look stronger than us.”
To bolster turnout and avert a flop, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been working the phones in recent days, speaking with the leaders of Argentina and Honduras, both of whom initially expressed support for Mexico's proposed boycott. Former Senator Christopher Dodd has also crisscrossed the region as a special adviser for the summit, in the process convincing far right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was a staunch ally of Trump but hasn't once spoken to Biden, to belatedly confirm his attendance.
Ironically, the decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela wasn't the whim of the U.S. alone. The region's governments in 2001, in Quebec City, declared that any break with democratic order is an “insurmountable obstacle” to future participation in the summit process.
The governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela aren’t even active members of the Washington-based Organization of the American States, which organizes the summit.
“This should’ve been a talking point from the beginning,” said former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon, who in a long diplomatic career attended several summits. “It’s not a U.S. imposition. It was consensual. If leaders want to change that, then we should have a conversation first.”
After the last summit in Peru, in 2018, which President Trump didn't even bother to attend, many predicted there was no future for the regional gathering. In response to Trump's historic pullout, only 17 of the region's 35 heads of state attended. Few saw value in bringing together for a photo op leaders from such dissimilar places as aid-dependent Haiti, industrial powerhouses Mexico and Brazil and violence-plagued Central America — each with their own unique challenges and bilateral agenda with Washington.
“As long as we don’t speak with a single voice, no one is going to listen to us," said former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who also faults Mexico and Brazil — the region's two economic powers — for the current drift in hemispheric relations. "With a cacophony of voices, it is much more difficult to find our place in the world."
To the surprise of many, the U.S. in early 2019 picked up the ball, offering to host the summit. At the time, the Trump administration was enjoying something of a leadership renaissance in Latin America, albeit among mostly similar-minded conservative governments around the narrow issue of restoring democracy in Venezuela.
But that goodwill unraveled as Trump floated the idea of invading Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro — a threat recalling the worst excesses of the Cold War. Then the pandemic hit, taking a devastating human and economic toll on a region that accounted for more than a quarter of the world's COVID-19 deaths despite making up only 8% of the population. The region's politics were upended.
The election of Biden, who was Obama's point man for Latin America and had decades of hands-on experience in the region from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, set expectations for a relaunch. But as popular angst spread during the pandemic, the Biden administration was slow to match the vaccine diplomacy of Russia and China, although it did eventually provide 70 million doses to the hemisphere. Biden also maintained the Trump-era restrictions on migration, reinforcing the view that it was neglecting its own neighbors.
Since then, Biden's hallmark policy in the region — a $4 billion aid package to attack the root causes of migration in Central America — has stalled in Congress with no apparent effort to revive it. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also diverted attention away from the region, something experts say could come back to bite Biden if rising interest rates in the U.S. trigger a stampede of capital outflows and debt defaults in emerging markets.
There have been smaller snubs too: When leftist millennial Gabriel Boric was elected president in Chile, setting high expectations for a generational shift in the region's politics, the U.S. delegation to his inauguration was led by the second-lowest ranking Cabinet member, Small Business Administrator Isabel Guzman.
Shannon said for the summit to be successful Biden shouldn’t try to lay out a grand American vision for the hemisphere but rather show sensitivity to the region’s embrace of other global powers, concerns about gaping inequality and traditional mistrust of the U.S.
“More than speeches," says Shannon, “”he will need to listen.”
___
AP Writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Daniel Politi in Buenos Aires, David Biller in Rio de Janeiro and Gonzalo Solano in Quito contributed to this report.
___
Goodman reported from Miami.
At this week's Summit of the Americas, Canada has stake in U.S. border challenges
WASHINGTON — If foreign policy was purely a matter of geography, one might assume Canada would be free to go check out the buffet at this week's Summit of the Americas once the discussion turns, as it surely will, to the migratory tide flooding the U.S.-Mexico border.
But at the dawn of a turbulent new geopolitical era, evidence is mounting that America's southern frontier — along with the political and economic challenges and opportunities it represents — is closer in many ways than most Canadians might realize.
And if President Joe Biden hopes to realize his vision of a comprehensive, holistic solution to the economic and social ills that imperil the Western Hemisphere, experts say he'll need Canada to be an integral part of that conversation.
"Canada has an enormous amount to contribute, because Canada is the country in the Americas that has come closest to getting immigration right," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington D.C.
"There's a lot that the rest of the Americas, including the United States, could be learning from Canada."
The idea behind the summit in Los Angeles, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will attend beginning Wednesday, is to find a way to address some of the underlying political, economic and social causes of northward migration in the first place.
En route, Trudeau will stop Tuesday in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he and Defence Minister Anita Anand will meet with commanders and military officials from Norad, the joint-command continental defence system that's awaiting a long-needed upgrade.
He'll be joined in California by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, who is scheduled to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mexican counterpart Marcelo Ebrard.
As a cornerstone of Canada's economic growth, federal immigration policy strikes a delicate balance between economic, humanitarian and labour-policy priorities, all the while preserving public buy-in to keep the ever-present political dangers at bay, Selee said.
Those dangers, weaponized to great effect by Donald Trump, now loom larger than ever in North America, where the former president's isolationist, build-the-wall rhetoric has proven so potent that it's become standard Republican doctrine.
And while the migration challenges at Canada's southern border pale in comparison to those that confront the U.S. along the Rio Grande Valley, they are there — and they share a connection.
Despite the more than 2,300 kilometres separating Canada from Mexico's northern frontier, U.S. customs officials as far north as Maine have in recent months encountered dozens of people who entered the country from the south.
It's likely many were headed to spots like Roxham Road, a popular destination for those looking to make a refugee claim in Canada without being returned to the U.S., which is what automatically happens when they show up at an official entry point.
"It would not be surprising if there are people coming from or through Latin America that really want to get to Canada in the end," Selee said.
"Canada has just enough people who come from elsewhere in the Americas that it could become a much more attractive destination over time, particularly if the U.S. is a less hospitable environment."
It's been 28 years since the U.S. hosted the inaugural Summit of the Americas in 1994, "and we're obviously living in different times," said Juan Gonzalez, the National Security Council's senior director for the Western Hemisphere.
For starters, Russia has invaded Ukraine, the lasting impact of an ongoing two-year pandemic continues to reverberate, inflation is testing new records and many people on this side of the planet are "really starting to question the value of democracy," Gonzalez said.
Biden will propose what Gonzalez called a strategy of shared responsibility and economic support for those countries most impacted by the flow of migration. It will also include a multilateral declaration "of unity and resolve" to bring the crisis under control.
Leaders of "source, transit or destination countries" will seek consensus on how to tackle a problem "that is actually impacting all the countries in the Americas," he said.
"We need to work together to address it in a way that treats migrants with dignity, invests in creating opportunities that would dissuade migrants from leaving their homes in the first place, and provide the protections that migrants deserve."
The U.S. Border Patrol calls it "push and pull" — the myriad factors that spur people around the world to abandon one country in favour of another, often as clandestinely as possible. Those motivations were muted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but no longer.
Police intercepted nearly 10,000 people entering Canada between official entry points during the first four months of the year, compared with just 3,944 during the same period of 2019. And last month alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 9,157 encounters at or near the Canada-U.S. border — seven times the 1,250 apprehensions in April 2021.
Late last month, two Honduran nationals appeared in court in Montana to face human smuggling charges after they allegedly led a group of migrants into the country by walking across the Canada-U.S. border.
Two U.S. citizens are also facing similar charges in a pair of separate cases — one last month that saw a group of Indian nationals rescued while trying to cross a river that separates Ontario from New York state, and one in Minnesota linked to the January deaths of a family of four from India who died of exposure in frigid conditions in Manitoba.
Agents in Maine have also recently encountered carloads of illegal migrants, including five Romanian nationals who entered from Canada. Two other separate incidents involved a total of 22 people, 14 from Mexico and seven from Ecuador, who entered the U.S. via the southern border.
"There are a number of push-and-pull factors … that make people want to leave their country or come to another country for one reason or another," said William Maddocks, the chief U.S. Border Patrol agent for Houlton Sector, which encompasses Maine.
Human smugglers are always keen to exploit that desire, he added. "Where these people see an opportunity for making a profit, that becomes their business. Anytime we change the laws, there will be people who seek to exploit those changes."
Other summit priorities will include helping countries bring COVID-19 under control, forging new ties on climate and energy initiatives, confronting food insecurity and leveraging existing trade agreements to better ensure more people are able to reap the benefits.
Defending core democratic values will also be a major focus in Los Angeles, which is part of why the U.S. has not invited leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to attend — three authoritarian countries with dubious records on human rights.
Others, including Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Bolivian President Luis Arce, have vowed not to attend unless all of the hemisphere's heads of government were invited. The U.S. has yet to release a final list of attendees.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2022.
James McCarten, The Canadian Press
WASHINGTON — If foreign policy was purely a matter of geography, one might assume Canada would be free to go check out the buffet at this week's Summit of the Americas once the discussion turns, as it surely will, to the migratory tide flooding the U.S.-Mexico border.
But at the dawn of a turbulent new geopolitical era, evidence is mounting that America's southern frontier — along with the political and economic challenges and opportunities it represents — is closer in many ways than most Canadians might realize.
And if President Joe Biden hopes to realize his vision of a comprehensive, holistic solution to the economic and social ills that imperil the Western Hemisphere, experts say he'll need Canada to be an integral part of that conversation.
"Canada has an enormous amount to contribute, because Canada is the country in the Americas that has come closest to getting immigration right," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington D.C.
"There's a lot that the rest of the Americas, including the United States, could be learning from Canada."
The idea behind the summit in Los Angeles, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will attend beginning Wednesday, is to find a way to address some of the underlying political, economic and social causes of northward migration in the first place.
En route, Trudeau will stop Tuesday in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he and Defence Minister Anita Anand will meet with commanders and military officials from Norad, the joint-command continental defence system that's awaiting a long-needed upgrade.
He'll be joined in California by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, who is scheduled to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mexican counterpart Marcelo Ebrard.
As a cornerstone of Canada's economic growth, federal immigration policy strikes a delicate balance between economic, humanitarian and labour-policy priorities, all the while preserving public buy-in to keep the ever-present political dangers at bay, Selee said.
Those dangers, weaponized to great effect by Donald Trump, now loom larger than ever in North America, where the former president's isolationist, build-the-wall rhetoric has proven so potent that it's become standard Republican doctrine.
And while the migration challenges at Canada's southern border pale in comparison to those that confront the U.S. along the Rio Grande Valley, they are there — and they share a connection.
Despite the more than 2,300 kilometres separating Canada from Mexico's northern frontier, U.S. customs officials as far north as Maine have in recent months encountered dozens of people who entered the country from the south.
It's likely many were headed to spots like Roxham Road, a popular destination for those looking to make a refugee claim in Canada without being returned to the U.S., which is what automatically happens when they show up at an official entry point.
"It would not be surprising if there are people coming from or through Latin America that really want to get to Canada in the end," Selee said.
"Canada has just enough people who come from elsewhere in the Americas that it could become a much more attractive destination over time, particularly if the U.S. is a less hospitable environment."
It's been 28 years since the U.S. hosted the inaugural Summit of the Americas in 1994, "and we're obviously living in different times," said Juan Gonzalez, the National Security Council's senior director for the Western Hemisphere.
For starters, Russia has invaded Ukraine, the lasting impact of an ongoing two-year pandemic continues to reverberate, inflation is testing new records and many people on this side of the planet are "really starting to question the value of democracy," Gonzalez said.
Biden will propose what Gonzalez called a strategy of shared responsibility and economic support for those countries most impacted by the flow of migration. It will also include a multilateral declaration "of unity and resolve" to bring the crisis under control.
Leaders of "source, transit or destination countries" will seek consensus on how to tackle a problem "that is actually impacting all the countries in the Americas," he said.
"We need to work together to address it in a way that treats migrants with dignity, invests in creating opportunities that would dissuade migrants from leaving their homes in the first place, and provide the protections that migrants deserve."
The U.S. Border Patrol calls it "push and pull" — the myriad factors that spur people around the world to abandon one country in favour of another, often as clandestinely as possible. Those motivations were muted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but no longer.
Police intercepted nearly 10,000 people entering Canada between official entry points during the first four months of the year, compared with just 3,944 during the same period of 2019. And last month alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 9,157 encounters at or near the Canada-U.S. border — seven times the 1,250 apprehensions in April 2021.
Late last month, two Honduran nationals appeared in court in Montana to face human smuggling charges after they allegedly led a group of migrants into the country by walking across the Canada-U.S. border.
Two U.S. citizens are also facing similar charges in a pair of separate cases — one last month that saw a group of Indian nationals rescued while trying to cross a river that separates Ontario from New York state, and one in Minnesota linked to the January deaths of a family of four from India who died of exposure in frigid conditions in Manitoba.
Agents in Maine have also recently encountered carloads of illegal migrants, including five Romanian nationals who entered from Canada. Two other separate incidents involved a total of 22 people, 14 from Mexico and seven from Ecuador, who entered the U.S. via the southern border.
"There are a number of push-and-pull factors … that make people want to leave their country or come to another country for one reason or another," said William Maddocks, the chief U.S. Border Patrol agent for Houlton Sector, which encompasses Maine.
Human smugglers are always keen to exploit that desire, he added. "Where these people see an opportunity for making a profit, that becomes their business. Anytime we change the laws, there will be people who seek to exploit those changes."
Other summit priorities will include helping countries bring COVID-19 under control, forging new ties on climate and energy initiatives, confronting food insecurity and leveraging existing trade agreements to better ensure more people are able to reap the benefits.
Defending core democratic values will also be a major focus in Los Angeles, which is part of why the U.S. has not invited leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to attend — three authoritarian countries with dubious records on human rights.
Others, including Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Bolivian President Luis Arce, have vowed not to attend unless all of the hemisphere's heads of government were invited. The U.S. has yet to release a final list of attendees.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2022.
James McCarten, The Canadian Press
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