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9th Summit of Americas: Tensions over invitations and lackadaisical agenda

 The White House was still completing the invitation list days before the summit in order to appease Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has vowed not to attend unless all states are invited.

The backlash arose after the Biden administration decided to exclude leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela due to their dictatorial natures. Bolivian President Luis Arce, like Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has stated that he will not attend until all heads of government in the Americas are invited.

The presidents of Argentina, Chile, and Honduras, among others, have joined the call for an all-inclusive conference. Furthermore, there are some who doubt the United States' decision to exclude those three countries.

Many of the invited countries, according to an opinion piece published on Aljazeera, are not paragons of the democratic qualities that the US underlined in picking countries to attend the summit.

138 human rights activists were slain in Colombia, a strong US ally, in 2021, according to the article "The 2022 Summit of the Americas: An embarrassment for Biden," which used data from the human rights organization Front Line Defenders.

In an interview with CMG, Professor Carlos Aquino Rodrguez of Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos argued that the United States should set ideology aside and focus on concrete issues such as migrants and commerce.

Unfortunately, Rodrguez added that ideological differences hinder the meeting from being inclusive.

'Progressively less ambitious'

The Summit of the Americas is the first to be hosted by the United States since the initial conference in Miami in 1994, with the goal of establishing a trade zone covering the majority of the continent.

Since then, the US has become increasingly hostile to free trade agreements, with Biden following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who claimed that such agreements harmed American workers.

 Trump took a strong position on Venezuela and Cuba, contradicting his predecessor Barack Obama's policy of warming up to the island, and he skipped the previous Americas Summit in Peru in 2018.

Each summit has grown "progressively less ambitious," according to Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, with a change "from a shared vision for democracy, trade, and prosperity to a place for taking a stand."

"The perfect time for Washington to express a commitment to regional prosperity and recovery," he said of the Los Angeles meeting. Furthermore, the absence of Mexico and Cuba prompted questions about how effective the summit will be in addressing migrant and COVID-19 issues.

According to the opinion post quoted above, having Mexico at the table to deal with "irregular migration" makes sense because more than 221,000 people were halted at the southern border in March of 2022. The story noted that Cuba is the only country in Latin America to have developed its own COVID-19 vaccines and that its exclusion from the summit, aims to "dramatically boost pandemic response."

From June 6 to 10, the ninth Summit of the Americas will be placed in Los Angeles. The summit brings together the leaders of North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean.

After hosting the first conference in Miami in 1994, the United States will host the summit for the second time; the summit has subsequently been held in countries around the Americas.

Joe Biden


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