Latin America’s divisions over defending democracy
A summit of distant neighbours
When the United States hosted the first Summit of the Americas, in Miami in 1994, the occasion had a ring of celebrity.
Democracy had spread across Latin America and with it economic liberalisation.
At the request of the Latin Americans, the 33 countries present—all except Communist Cuba—agreed to work on a Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa).
As Joe Biden prepares to host the ninth summit in Los Angeles next month, the picture looks very different.
This time the get-together seems certain to highlight Latin America’s internal disagreements and its partial retreat from democracy and free trade.
To start with, it is not clear who will be there.
Mr Biden’s team say that they intend to invite only countries with democratically elected leaders, which excludes the leftist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Cuba, which was invited to the past two summits, held in Panama and Lima, is campaigning against its exclusion.
In response, Bolivia and Honduras have said they will not attend.
So has Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, though he added that his foreign minister would go.
For different reasons, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right-wing leader, seems unlikely to attend.
A fan of Donald Trump, he has not spoken to Mr Biden.
Others, such as Argentina and Chile, say they want all countries to be present but that they will nevertheless turn up.
Since Brazil and Mexico are the second- and third-most-populous countries in the Americas, the absences of Mr Bolsonaro and Mr López Obrador would hurt.
The latter especially, since Mr Biden’s team wants to forge a deal to manage migration at the summit.
The post-covid surge in migrants at Mexico’s border with the United States is a nightmare for the White House.
But migration is a headache for many Latin American countries, too: some 6m Venezuelans have left home, as have more than 100,000 Cubans in recent months.
That is chiefly a result of their own governments’ economic mismanagement, but some Latin Americans blame American sanctions.
American diplomats are quietly countering the prospective boycotts.
The English-speaking Caribbean, which has friendly ties to both Cuba and Venezuela, seems likely to reverse a previous decision to stay away.
And Mr López Obrador, who received American envoys this week, may also change his mind.
On May 16th the Biden administration announced that it would ease some of Mr Trump’s restrictions on remittances, travel and flights to Cuba.
In March American officials held talks in Caracas with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s ruler, in which they offered to soften sanctions if he agreed to a return to democracy.
To ease talks between the government and the opposition, this week the administration allowed Chevron, an American oil firm, to renegotiate its operating licence in Venezuela.
In Los Angeles Mr Biden will say that “the region’s democratic self-determination is something we see as fundamental…regardless of countries’ ideological preferences,” according to an administration official.
Yet some leftist governments in the region don’t see democracy as a dividing line.
“We should focus on economic development and try to reach a new political understanding with the United States,” says a Mexican official.
In 2001, on the day of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, foreign ministers from the Americas signed a charter pledging to defend democracy where it is under attack.
Yet this kind of evangelising for democracy is a recent development.
An older tradition is re-emerging, which invokes non-intervention in domestic affairs.
That is driven, in part, by what some see as the United States’ selective support for democracy.
Its diminishing influence in Latin America, a function of China’s growing presence and its own political dysfunction, does not help.
A dozen ambassadorial posts in the region are vacant, with some nominees blocked by Senate Republicans.
Moreover Mr Trump’s grandstanding against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela failed to weaken, let alone dislodge, their regimes.
There are pragmatic reasons to think that talking works better than ostracism.
Staying away from the summit would not just fall into the same trap, and reveal the Latin American left’s double standards on democracy.
It would also send the message that an economically stagnant region, which scotched the idea of the ftaa years ago, has nothing to discuss with what is still the world’s biggest market.
That would be a declaration of parochialism and failure.
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