Former Bolivian President Evo Morales appropriately described the ongoing Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles as a “stillborn…born dead,” due to the exclusion of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. Sacha Llorente, a former Bolivian diplomat, noted that the summit “failed even before it began,” but added that those who were not invited “will be very much present…. Due to the [U.S.’s] arbitrary discrimination, those who don’t go are protesting but those who do go will also protest,” because the summit has nothing to offer, Telesur reported him saying. Addressing Venezuela’s Parliament yesterday, President Nicolas Maduro captured the summit’s essence: “It has no agenda, it has no theme, it has no decision points, it has nothing to link the meeting to the problems and issues that are of interest and a priority for the people of the Americas.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre are still twisting themselves into knots trying to explain why Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela weren’t invited and insisting that Mexican President Lopez Obrador’s absence isn’t a big deal because in the end, as Jean-Pierre said, Mexico will contribute in a big way to the summit’s “deliverables.”
Deliverables? Here’s where the “stillborn” part comes in. Every nation in the Americas is in urgent need of economic development, infrastructure building, healthcare, and some require emergency assistance in areas such as healthcare, housing, disaster relief, and education — Haiti, for example, and other parts of the Caribbean. What Joe Biden will present with much fanfare June 8 is the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. Purported to be a program for economic development, it is doomed to fail for the simple reason that it is based on the existing economic paradigm of free trade, private sector investment, decarbonization and “clean energy jobs,” and “sustainable and inclusive trade.”
In a situation of global financial collapse, anything less than what the Schiller Institute has proposed for regional economic development based on U.S.-Chinese cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) won’t work, and the Americas Partnership is a sorry alternative to the BRI.
