Date in Los Angeles: Summits (and depths) of the Americas

The Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles is a failed artifact. An abstraction whose meaning is elusive and threatens to harm its organizers who have been exposed to a snub from the “back yard” if indeed Mexico and other countries do not send their presidents.

America’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s prominent adviser, on the president’s recent trip to Asia inadvertently synthesized the device’s defect.

On the record of China and Russia, he raised the need for the democracies of the planet to unite against autocracies and do so under the leadership of the United States. The second part of that formulation is nostalgic.

In addition to the well -known rhetoric repeated by academics about the acute North American detachment from the region and that these borders have very different themes from those interested in Washington today, the fact is that Latin America is no different from Europe in its current view of the US.

American power is visibly pierced by a fierce polarization, with a surprisingly regressive present of book censorship and a vigorous Republican party that despises democratic protocols. Which led to the passage of many laws deceive the right to vote of minorities and assign a qualified white vote.

So why shouldn’t the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Cuban dictatorships be in this situation as well, because they suggest that there is some satire, and despite the North American restrictions, the defenders of the region an extremist and stupid version of the notion of non -interference.

Joe Biden’s government envisioned this summit as part of a cluster of global intentions aimed at rebuilding the guardian image of the United States. America is back, his campaign slogan, determined the purpose of redefine the agenda, the alliances and the procedures with the flag of democracy and free world.

The Democratic president sought to resolve this way the wound caused by Donald Trump’s populist management, a decadent phenomenon in which Latin Americans and Europeans have thorough knowledge from their own experience of these deformations.

Trump’s Legacy

In all these meetings, the political history of this president can be seen, dating back to the US. it combined hegemonic identity in the confrontation with Eastern communism. Democracy Vs. autocracy, which has always been the message in his speeches, partially recognizing that clue.

But this conference, as happened at the pointless Democracy Summit that ended without results last December, exposes the limitations of that reconstruction even before it even begins. showing that there is no basis for an alignment as Sullivan suggests.

Thesis critics democracy vs. autocracy They made it clear that the world is not really as simple as that phrase suggests. ” observe in international relations John Hopkins School scholar Hal Brands.

Remember, in case you forgot, that Washington at all times “must cooperate with illiberal regimes like Singapore, Turkey or Vietnam to control other opponents.” And, worse, with undemocratic monarchies like Saudi Arabia.

Jorge Heine, former Chilean ambassador to China and professor of international relations in Boston, added another difficulty to the argument. “A few days ago, the US-ASEAN summit took place in Washington, attended by eight heads of state and government from Southeast Asia, including two communist countries such as Cuba, Vietnam and Laos.” There were no objections, the analyst said.

After the costly disaster of leaving Afghanistan, The United States was able to regain centrality The adventures of Vladimir Putin’s warrior go hand in hand. That conflict, which has mobilized the world because of the aggressor’s bizarre barbarity, has triggered an alliance between the largest Western capitals not seen since World War II.

But this construction responds to circumstances and hardly anticipates the future or what will be the same, a return to the golden past of the empire. The proposals for European strategic independence developed by French President Emmanuel Macron and the German decision to triple its defense budget confirm this observation in two dimensions.

One is the notion that the US should assume another on the table and from now on will need its own personality and sharpness in the global agenda. The other, which justifies the former, is that Biden, whose image is declining, will lose the November elections. paving the way for the return of populist trumpism which will attest to the shrinking of North America’s global hierarchy.

This is a different world. Although not so much for Latin America, tired of pandemics, futility and abuses.

The changes

The region continues to be heterogeneous although it registers a slight political movement towards the center, right or left, as shown by Chile, Honduras or Uruguay and this could happen in Colombia if Gustavo Petro wins this weekend or in Brazil if Lula won da Silva in October. The left is not always on the other side of the right.

These changes happen even with extreme phenomenon as liberal turn, albeit economically only, registered in Venezuela.

These mutations, among other factors, can be explained as a reaction to the failure of populism-a false socialism on these shores and a neo-fascism among Europeans-to deal with the crises that worsened in the pandemic and now. including the war in Ukraine.

Kirchnerism’s electoral defeats in Argentina have this root. So has the moderation of the reform process in Chile since the convulsions in 2019. In Brazil, the loss of Jair Bolsonaro’s image only finds comfort in the distribution of state aid funds; a populist government diluted with promises will show nothing more, to the fullest the markets depend on Lula.

But these evolutions have no guarantees of continuity. Crises also serve as a cauldron for nationalist distortions, as a threat to be repeated in the US, or what happened in France with the strengthening of Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Bolsonaro, like Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador, warns that he will not go to the summit in the guise of the proximity of elections, but he changed his mind at the promise of a private meeting with Biden.

The right -wing Brazilian is one of the few leaders in the world who continues to insist that Trump is a victim of fraud and still claims his ties to Russia. But this quote finds him strengthen their electoral position. There is no real connection or interest in the summit.

Washington decided that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela should not be invited because their governments, frankly, are not democratic. That’s why AMLO didn’t go. But those restrictions are also not directly related to the summit. His intentions exclusive is to avoid intimidating Latino diasporas who form a major electorate in Florida before the legislative elections.

So that’s it “There’s really a lot of debate about what these events are for,” he said. said Brian Winter, at American Quarterlythe journal he manages by the American Studies Association.

“Are they a reward for good behavior?” asks ironically warning that “many Latin American governments feel that guest list management is an attempt to turn the clock back to 1990 or early 2000 when Washington was clearly sitting at the top of the table. Those days are gone. “

It may come as a surprise that most in the region are willing to look for subjects like autocrats neosomocyst Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega on an equal footing with the leaders of democracies that may not be perfect but far from developing dictatorships.

This is not a new thing. With the exception of Argentina by Raúl Alfonsín, then confronted with Peronism, who called for pardon for the military, the region in general has become very vulnerable to its tyrants.

“Latin America has become a great place to kill in the name of the country and against communism, and it is a great place to kill, steal, kidnap, commit corruption, on the payroll of drug traffickers or aboard of the horse. fierce and the vices of the human condition ”, wrote in March 2007 a well -known regional observer, Juan Jesús Aznares, in the newspaper. The Country of Madrid.

He did so in a powerful text that denounced the difficulties in going to court against the curious as Guatemalan Efraín Rios Montt or any of his accomplices in 34 years of armed conflict in that country. Just an example of everything else, he says.

Ortega, now leading a dictatorship that seems to have been copied from Alfredo Stroessner’s dark Paraguay along with other authoritarian models, including political prisoners, massacres of opponents and radical censorship.

But like his colleague Nicolás Maduro or the current decadent Cuban hierarchy, he has a useful tic: he rejects the United States and along with this it was enough to make them revolutionary. Word blessed in these places.

As Winter observes regarding ambivalent standards in democracy in the region, “it is perfectly fair to ask whether López Obrador and his associates defended the right of Argentine dictator Jorge Videla or of Chilean Augusto Pinochet to participate in Los Angeles. summit. ”Good question.

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