The United States is excluding Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the forthcoming Summit of the Americas. Washington probably wasn’t expecting that much of Latin America, led by Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, would publicly push back in response.
So far, the Ninth Summit of the Americas, to be held in Los Angeles from June 6 to 10, is not going according to plan. It is certainly not promising to be the celebration of US leadership in the western hemisphere that Joe Biden’s administration wanted.
This is, in large part, because many Latin American and Caribbean governments are unhappy with the US government’s decision to exclude Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the summit. Countries throughout the hemisphere have grown accustomed to US double standards where democracy and human rights protections are flaunted. Who can forget that the United States managed to have Cuba expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) but never batted an eye over the memberships of Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Argentina under Jorge Rafael Videla, or Guatemala under Rios Montt, to name but a few murderous governments?
And this practice of politicizing democracy and human rights remains largely unchanged. Haiti’s most recent elections were held in 2016; its government lacks any democratic legitimacy and, furthermore, faces very serious accusations. But Haiti has not been blacklisted from the Americas summit. Nor, of course, has Colombia, one of the United States’ closest allies, despite its historical and ongoing abysmal human rights record.
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