Washington —
U.S. President Joe Biden heads to Los Angeles, California, Wednesday to host the ninth Summit of the Americas (SOA) – a gathering that will be skipped by the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and others amid protests of Washington’s exclusion of the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The absence of six heads of government has cast a shadow over what nominally is billed as a hemisphere-wide summit to address the region’s challenges, including economic insecurity, pandemic recovery, climate change, migration and political polarization.
Facing domestic political pressure, including from exile communities in the swing state of Florida, the administration concluded that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela do not meet the requirements of the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter that enshrines democracy as a core value. Washington formally announced their omission from the summit’s guest list on June 5, the day before the event began.
U.S. officials downplayed the tensions that have arisen. Observers say the episode is emblematic of the challenges the Biden administration faces to reassert U.S. influence and repair ties that became frayed under former President Donald Trump.
Trump did not attend the last summit in Peru in 2018, but in 2019 offered the U.S. as host of the next one as his administration sought to galvanize Latin American governments to press for restoring democratic rule in Venezuela. The region was further split when Trump floated the idea of invading the country to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
The U.S. recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president after the country’s 2018 presidential election that was widely decried as flawed. A senior administration official told reporters there is “a good chance” that Biden will engage with Guaidó during the summit.
Some observers view the boycotts as yet another sign of weakening U.S. influence in the Americas after decades of neglect shown by Washington toward the region. They say the Biden administration, while pivoting away from Trump’s combative tone, continues to place Latin America lower on its list of priorities – reflected in part by about a dozen vacant ambassador positions in the Americas – as it focuses on China’s rising influence and, more recently, on Russia’s invasion on Ukraine.
“There is no question that right now, the region feels it is not getting the attention that it should,” said Steve Liston, senior director at the Washington office of the Council of the Americas to VOA. “They just haven't seen the engagement.”
Biden has decades of hands-on experience with Latin America from his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as then-President Barack Obama’s point man for the region. As president, however, Biden has been seen as slow in providing COVID-19 vaccine donations to the region, forcing countries to initially rely on Beijing and Moscow before the U.S. eventually provided 70 million doses to the hemisphere.
Juan Gonzalez is the U.S. national security council senior director for the Western Hemisphere. He told reporters Biden will launch an initiative at the summit to strengthen health systems to prepare the region for future pandemics and a new partnership on climate and energy with Caribbean nations.
Biden will also announce more than $300 million in food aid for the region and “America's Partnership for Economic Prosperity” to promote an “equitable recovery” from the pandemic, including plans for “an ambitious reform of the Inter-American Development Bank,” a senior administration official said during a briefing to reporters.
The partnership appears similar in format to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework that Biden launched in Tokyo in May, which does not boost access to American markets. As such, the proposed partnership may prove underwhelming at the summit, said Ryan Berg, senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Berg notes that many nations in the Americas seek steps toward new trade pacts or the expansion of existing agreements to include boosting digital economic activity, nearshoring and other developmental initiatives.
“If the agenda was such that it was so attractive that presidents couldn't defect and not be present then we wouldn't see this kind of political theater in the hemisphere,” Berg told VOA.
On the margins of the summit, Biden and other heads of government will sign a regional migration pact focusing on helping communities that are hosting migrants, promoting “humane migration management, and a shared approach to mitigating and managing irregular migration,” the senior administration official said.