Meeting in Los Angeles: Abyss (and vertices) of the Americas

Latin America it is mostly adrift. With their economies in decline due to the double effect of the crisis associated with the pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine that has disrupted global prices and triggered inflation and international rate hikes.

is a perfect storm in a hemisphere that sees as protagonists the United States, the greatest world power, but which lacks a strategic relationship with the borders that distort the Rio Grande with the well-known political consequences of demagogy, opportunism and improvisation. That paradox has expanded over the years.

This flaw was exposed at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. There were no notions of construction of, apart from conjunctural rhetoric a new order which makes it possible to modify the conditions that make Latin American decadence possible. It is not about refounding American leadership, that is a raw obsession of the latest US administrations.

The idea, on the other hand, should have the maturity required by the stage. Michael Shifter and Bruno Binetti of Inter-American dialogue, to put it eloquently by arguing that “what the hemisphere now needs from the United States is a more humble and focused approach that recognizes the limits of Washington’s influence; a policy for a Post-American Latin America “.

Failing that, in the absence of a serious commitment to forge closer ties, America will risk “further alienating a region that has become increasingly distant and disillusioned with its neighbor to the north “.

The concept of post-Americanism It refers to the creation of another type of consensus after the imperial one that for decades has mediated the link between the American South and North. There is no longer any possibility that this act of domination will repeat itself.

emergencies

But the United States should align emergencies in the region which requires economic commitments related to its social debt, the recovery of its accumulation rate and sustainable development, in addition to the typical ecological agenda, new energies and technologies.

However, it is difficult due to the complicated global context and because the region turns on itself: as investment decreases, governance becomes more complicated and as it becomes more complicated, inflows of investment through the suicidal deterioration of the business environment.

It is possible that the most spectacular and didactic data that was compared with the Los Angeles appointment was the huge column of thousands of migrants that on the same day as the Summit began they left in the rain, on foot, from Tapachula, in southern Mexico, to the United States, hoping to get there what they did not get in Haiti, El Salvador, Venezuela or Honduras .

Joe Biden’s government, although it has had different gestures regarding this huge problem unlike its populist predecessor Donald Trump, also maintains the central notion of “do not come”.

But they go because the reasons that fuel this flight have not changed and the measures to resolve it were mediocre or barely rhetorical and generally repressive. The key with migrations to the Americas or Europe is not where they go, but where (and why) they come from.

It is not just the responsibility of Vice President Kamala Harris, responsible for that serious package on desperate migration, that it has not worked.

It is a consequence of the fact that the region is not part of the main universe of power in economic and therefore political terms, so its problems fall into that expression that has become famous for defining the Argentine decision-making limboprocrastination. Everything remains for an unattainable later.

Thus, the assembly of the Summit of the Americas has shown a torrent of weaknesses and new program acronyms are accumulating: APEP now (Alliance for Economic Prosperity of the Americas) which born with no clear numbers or management plans. Does anyone remember the BW3, Build Back Better announced last year by Joe Biden to oppose the BRI or the Chinese Silk Road?

critics

Dan Restrepo, who was Barack Obama’s advisor for Latin America, criticized the Summit as “a fatally flawed forum that fails to achieve its purpose and limits our country’s attention to its neighbors to an event that occurs. check every three or four years “.

There is a contradiction, too, because Washington needs to regain centrality in its space of direct influence for a higher goal, which is competition with a Chinese more dynamic than having become the main partner of a major handful of countries in the region.

Shifter tells a striking example of this nonsense. The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, was interested in negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States, but “in today’s Washington he has found no possibility. Lasso is of course now exploring a similar deal with Beijing. “

The situation in the region initially provides a snapshot the incompetence of most of their governments with notable notable exceptions, to deal with the public question. There is a mess of alleged lefts, which in reality are caudillesche deformations that do not serve to resolve the development of their peoples. Rather, they are a toxic consequence of crises.

But if you look at the film, it is clear at the same time that without the enormous concentration of income of the 1990s, for example, Chavismo would not have exploded in Venezuela, which was anything but a socialist phenomenon. A less exclusive scenario would have had different results.