(CN) — President Joe Biden called for unity as he closed the week-long Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, which was overshadowed by national absentees and Argentina's president’s critical speech directed at the U.S.
Biden’s exclusion of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba led to boycotts from national leaders of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras and Guatemala. Brazil’s right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro U-turned on his decision not to attend after being given a bilateral meeting with Biden, while Argentina’s center-left President Alberto Fernández remained on the fence until the week before the 9th summit.
The U.S. president presented two main initiatives: a new economic association named the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity and the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which aims to transform the approach to managing migration in the region.
Although 20 nations signed the declaration, the absence of the leaders of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — key nations that lie along the migration pathways that the U.S. is trying to tackle — casts doubt over its long-term viability.
Fernández, as head of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), was given a prime slot to deliver his speech to the rest of the region’s leaders and promised to speak on behalf of the absent countries of ECLAC. On the second day of the summit, the UN body released a report that found, in the context of “sharp economic slowdown, rising inflation and a slow and incomplete recovery of labor markets,” regional poverty is expected to reach 33.7% and extreme poverty 14.9%.
Driven by the discord over Biden’s guest list and a sense of diminishing U.S. influence in the region, Fernández took to the stage with a strengthened position to deliver a damning discourse.
His 8-minute speech delivered broad criticism aimed at Washington, its financial institutions and regional organizations, while asking for the resignation of the head of the Organization of the Americas (OAS). Fernández began by denouncing the continued economic blockades of Cuba and Venezuela as well as excluding them along with Nicaragua from the summit.
“Cuba has endured a blockade of more than six decades imposed in the years of the Cold War and Venezuela endures another one while a pandemic that devastates humanity drags with it millions of lives,” said Fernández. “Such measures seek to condition governments, but in reality, they only hurt the people.”
Biden’s decision to exclude nations based on their lack of democracy was difficult to digest for other regional leaders, particularly due to the U.S.’s close relations with dictatorships and theocracies. Biden is set to meet with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman next month, who according to a CIA investigation ordered the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Fernández then directed his attention to the Trump administration and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“President Biden,” said Fernández, “the years prior to your arrival in government were marked by an immensely harmful policy for our region deployed by the administration that preceded you. It is time for those policies to change and for the damage to be repaired.”
For the Argentine leader, the Trump administration intervened in talks between the IMF and the previous center-right Argentina government to “facilitate an unsustainable indebtedness in favor of an Argentine government in decline,” which was carried out “with the sole purpose of preventing what ended up being the electoral triumph” of Fernández’s coalition government. The country has a debt of $57 billion to the IMF — the largest in the institution’s history, from which “all the Argentine people are suffering today,” added Fernández.