Biden targets Latin America reset at summit marred by invite tension
SMA NEWS – WASHINGTON
When the United States said last year it would host the 2022 Summit of the Americas, officials had high hopes the event would help repair Trump-era damage to relations and reassert US primacy over China’s growing clout in Latin America.
But on the cusp of the coming week’s gathering in Los Angeles, US President Joe Biden faces a struggle to make a success of a summit plagued by problems before it even began.
Ideological discord over who to invite, scepticism about US commitment to Latin America, and low expectations for major accords on issues such as migration and economic cooperation have already tarnished the event, officials and analysts say.
“The Americans basically misread the situation in not having foreseen there would be a fuss about who was attending,” said Andres Rozental, a former Mexican deputy foreign minister, arguing the summit ran the risk of becoming “lackluster”.
One US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, conceded preparations were “messier than we envisioned”.
Lower-level events begin on Monday (Jun 6), then leaders start to arrive. Biden is due in on Wednesday to formally open the first US-hosted summit since the inaugural gathering in 1994.
Despite pressing concerns such as inflation, mass shootings, and the Ukraine conflict, Biden aims to re-engage with southern neighbors to forge a common vision after years of relative neglect under his “America First” predecessor, Donald Trump, who skipped the last summit in Lima in 2018.
Those hopes have been tempered by wrangling over who will attend. As host, the United States can choose who it invites but early plans indicated that US antagonists Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua would be excluded on the grounds they are undemocratic.
That upset some leaders, including Mexico’s leftist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said he would not go unless all countries from the Americas were invited.
