President Joe Biden will meet with leaders from Latin American and Caribbean countries for a summit on the region’s economic and migration challenges, testing his ability to marshal cooperation in the Western Hemisphere at a time when American influence appears to be waning.
Biden, who has long touted his relationships with world leaders and deep foreign policy expertise, will arrive in Los Angeles Tuesday under a smog of dimmed expectations for a week of speeches and agreements intended to meet the region’s most pressing needs — with some of its biggest players missing.
“There’s no other part of the world that impacts the security and prosperity of the United States more directly than the Western Hemisphere,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters.
But Biden’s lofty agenda for the Summit of the Americas is facing skepticism, and while the president has persuaded some democracies to attend, his decision to exclude several autocrats has turned other important partners away.
WHITE HOUSE: ‘WE DON’T REGRET’ WITHHOLDING AMERICAS SUMMIT INVITES FROM ‘DICTATORS’
“It’s an opportunity missed,” Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and Americas Society, said of the boycott by Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and others involved in the Biden administration’s efforts to stem northbound migration from Central America. “We need everybody at the table. You can’t get to Mexico from Nicaragua without going through Guatemala. And you can’t get to the United States from Guatemala without going through Mexico.”
Reminders of the challenges facing Biden in the region are not far. A caravan of thousands of migrants is making its way toward the 2,000-mile-long border the United States shares with Mexico, hoping to arrive while the president is hosting the summit.
The timing is intended to draw attention to the plight of migrants fleeing countries south of the U.S. border and highlight the frustrations with the American asylum system.
While the centerpiece of the Biden administration’s announcements during the week will be the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, an economic recovery plan from the coronavirus pandemic, the president is expected to announce a pact on Friday designed to limit and control undocumented migration, too.
An administration official said Biden will also urge reforms to the Inter-American Development Bank to boost private investment in the region and commit $300 million by the United States toward food aid. Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced $1.9 billion in new private sector investments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Whether these measures will stop countries in the Western Hemisphere from turning toward China, a major trading partner for the region, isn’t clear.
“There’s a lot of corridor chatter about China and what is the U.S. doing to compete,” said Farnsworth, speaking to the Washington Examiner from the Los Angeles InterContinental hotel ahead of Biden’s arrival in the city Wednesday. He said he didn’t think that Washington would raise the issue directly: “That’s going to be left implicit, and they’ll try to talk about it in a different context.”
For Harris, whom Biden tasked with fixing the causes of illegal migration to the U.S., the summit was an opportunity to showcase her efforts since taking on the assignment. But despite the vice president’s outreach to President Xiomara Castro of Honduras, whose inauguration she attended in January, and her meetings with Guatemala’s leader in his country last year, neither will attend the summit.
The pushback stems from Biden’s refusal to invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which the White House has called a matter of principle for the president.
Downplaying the boycott, a senior administration official called the choice by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to forgo the events “a sovereign decision” that “we just disagree with.”
The countries are still sending ministerial-level delegations to the summit and will sign onto the agreements, the official said.
“The U.S. remains the most powerful force in driving hemispheric actions to address core challenges facing the people of the Americas: inequality, health, climate, and food security,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted Monday. “And so the president continues to be a leader in the hemisphere.”
But when Lopez Obrador announced his final decision on Monday, he slammed the U.S. in fiery remarks criticizing America’s “centuries”-long push for “domination” by way of “exclusionary” policies he said needed to change.
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Those frustrations are likely to remain a sticking point for the administration as it looks to demonstrate American influence in the region.
“How do you pivot this conversation away from the overwhelming sense of historical grievances that some people bring to the table?” said Farnsworth, a veteran of the Clinton White House who worked with the former president’s special representative to the summit. “That’s a real challenge.”
