Summit of the Americas boycott a sign that freedom is regressing in Latin America

National Post, 12 June 2022

That a regional power like Mexico would prefer solidarity with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela over the freedom agenda is troubling

If there hadn’t been a Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles this week, would anyone have missed it?

Aside from Jimmy Kimmel that is, who secured an interview with President Joe Biden. Appearing on the late-night chat show was one of the concrete achievements of Biden’s West Coast trip. The president lathered the butter upon Kimmel at the outset, professing his delight in “having a conversation with someone who is really smart.” Did Biden mean to contrast the Kimmel chinwag with the conversations he would be having with other leaders? He did meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

There were a good number who chose to miss the summit. Most notable was Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Other no-shows included the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which was rather inconvenient as a summit priority was the crisis in migrants heading north from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Mexico’s Lopez Obrador and others skipped the meeting to protest the Biden administration’s exclusion of the heads of government of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from attending. That was in accord with a resolution taken at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, when it was decided that dictators were not to be invited.

The boycott by Mexico and others is a powerful symbol of how Latin American priorities have changed. The freedom agenda of the 1990s has been left behind, replaced by a new agenda that emphasizes sovereignty and cultural solidarity. In that, the inability of the Los Angeles summit to attract full participation is indicative of broad global trends that are retrenching precisely on the globalization push of the past 30 years.

The Summit of the Americas was inaugurated by president Bill Clinton in Miami in 1994. Latin America had just emerged from a decade lost to predatory public officials, economic privation and political violence.

Hope was on the horizon. The U.S. had just concluded the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico, one of the first major battles of the new Clinton administration. In 1994, Latin America’s future looked bright, and the Americas summit was aimed at consolidating democratic politics and economic liberty, with the ambition of expanding NAFTA to become truly hemispheric free trade.

Hence the Quebec City decision followed logically, that tyrants were not welcome in the planning of Latin America’s new liberal democratic, open trading and prosperous future.

Yet now the tyrants are back (save for Cuba, where they never left). Nicaragua, like the proverbial dog (literally, it is in the Book of Proverbs) that returns to its vomit, has returned to Daniel Ortega, the president who won “re-election” last fall. He had imprisoned his opponents before voting day.

Venezuela has suffered nine years of repression and deprivation under Nicolas Maduro, a knock-off version of Hugo Chávez, but no less tyrannical for that. The pauperization of a petro-economy is not easy to accomplish, but Chavismo has managed it.

I wrote of the lamentable regression of Latin America last fall, but the boycott of the Los Angeles summit indicates that matters are worse than I thought.

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