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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday he will not attend this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles after President Biden declined to extend invitations to three authoritarian Western Hemisphere countries: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
The rejection of the southern neighbor of the United States, two days before Biden landed in California, is a blow to Biden’s efforts to assert regional leadership and address issues ranging from climate change to immigration. While the announcement came as no surprise, the White House expected Lopez Obrador, one of the region’s most prominent leaders, to attend the meeting.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said officials had been talking to Lopez Obrador and other Latin American leaders for more than a month and that the announcement did not come as a surprise to the administration. But he said Biden felt compelled to take a “position of principles” on human rights abuses in the three countries.
López Obrador’s movement reflects the challenges of Biden’s often-held view that the world is facing a broad confrontation between democracies and dictatorships.
Summit faces boycott on invitation list
In an effort to offset the announcement, Jean-Pierre said Lopez Obrador would visit Washington in July to meet directly with Biden. He also praised Mexico’s contributions to this week’s summit, which focuses on issues such as democracy, clean energy, politics, migration and the recovery of the coronavirus pandemic, and noted that it would attend the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the country.
“It’s important to recognize that there are different opinions on this issue in our hemisphere, as there are in the United States,” Jean-Pierre said. “The president’s position is that we do not believe that dictators should be invited, which is why the [Mexican] The president has decided not to attend. “
During the summit, which officially began on Monday, leaders and others from North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean are scheduled to explore economic and general goals for the Western Hemisphere. But the meeting is also a testament to U.S. influence in the region, especially since Biden’s foreign policy has focused heavily on Europe and Asia.
He has devoted much of his attention to Ukraine, which is struggling to defend itself against the Russian invasion. And he visited Japan and South Korea last month in an effort to curb China’s growing economic and military power.
Biden stressed that his presidency marks a step in the policies of “America First” under President Donald Trump, which treated relations, especially in Latin America, as more transactional. It has sought to strengthen ties with countries that share American values.
However, this can be a tricky endeavor. Biden held a “summit for democracy” in December, for example, but invited some countries like Pakistan and the Philippines that hardly seemed to qualify.
The United States has hosted the Summit of the Americas for the first time since its inception in 1994 and, as a host, has a large margin of maneuver over official guests. But the summit has exposed both regional disputes and bilateral tensions.
Several Latin American leaders had already chosen not to attend, including leaders of Guatemala and Honduras, northern triangle countries that have been at the center of the administration’s efforts to curb illegal immigration. Honduras sends a lower-level delegation in protest of the exclusion.
Jean-Pierre said 68 delegations and at least 23 heads of government would be represented at the summit, allowing participants to engage in talks on issues of regional importance. “Our attendance will be the same as we have had in the past,” he said. “Yes, we will have this couple of countries that will not attend, but [Biden] he believes that he must follow his principles. “
However, the decision not to invite the trio of authoritarian countries has opened the United States to criticism of which countries are labeled as totalitarian pariahs.
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Chilean President Gabriel Boric said on Monday that while he will never stop using his voice “to defend human rights,” the exclusion of the United States from Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela “is not the right way.” .
“We think it’s a mistake, a mistake,” he told reporters in Ottawa at a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “and we’ll say it during the summit.”
He added that resentment could be counterproductive, allowing excluded leaders to cite it as evidence of U.S. hostility. “When the United States claims to exclude certain countries from the summit, they are actually strengthening the position that these other countries are taking in their own countries,” Boric said.
Trudeau added that it is “extremely important that we have the opportunity to relate to our hemispheric peers, some with similar ideas, others less related.” He did not say explicitly whether he agreed with the exclusion of the three countries, but noted that Ottawa has long had a different approach to Cuba than Washington.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Jean-Pierre was confronted with questions about why the United States continues to deal with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, whose heir prince is accused of being the architect of the assassination. and the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi dissidents. have been outraged by reports that Biden is planning a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia without claiming responsibility for Khashoggi’s assassination or human rights improvements.
In March, the Biden White House sent a delegation to discuss energy sanctions with Venezuela, another country with significant oil reserves. The meeting took place weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, as the administration tried to reduce the political and economic impact of rising gas prices. The regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is being investigated by an international criminal court for crimes against humanity.
Senator Robert Menendez (DN.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was pleased that the administration was excluding “authoritarian thugs,” but that the absence of Lopez Obrador “will unfortunately push back the efforts to continue to repair the relationship and cooperate on issues related to the well-being of our nations. “
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He accused López Obrador of having chosen to be “with dictators and despots to represent the interests of the Mexican people at a summit with his partners from all over the hemisphere.”
But Jean-Pierre stressed that the United States’ relationship with Mexico remained unchanged and said, “We see them as a friend.”
Amanda Coletta contributed to this report.