US Summit: An Important Week for Biden’s Foreign Policy | The meeting in Los Angeles begins Monday with the Forum of Civil Society Organizations

From Washington, D.C.

An important week begins for the government Joe Biden In matters of foreign policy. This Monday, in the city Los Angeles CaliforniaRepresentatives of civil society will meet within the framework of the private sector and the governments of the continent IX Summit of the United States. Not at all: no call for presidents from the United States Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Louis Ars from Bolivia said he would not go. The final list of participants is unknown, although regional leaders still have a few hours to land on the sunny west coast of the North American country.

The absence of a Mexican president may be a key feature. Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that he was not going to attend Otherwise, all countries in the region are invited. The United States has expelled leaders of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, including Daniel Ortega, Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Connell, from the meeting, saying they are undemocratic. Last week, the White House indicated that there were “final considerations” on the guest list and said it would be announced “soon”, but until the kick-off, there was no news yet.

The U.S. Council also includes a number of heads of state known as the Northern Triangle, written in pencil: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Three countries are mentioned in the policy Migration Washington as a provider of persons crossing the U.S. border across Mexico. The absence of the leaders of these countries, coupled with Lopez O’Brien, would directly harm the White House’s intentions regarding this summit, which seeks to achieve a new migration agreement for the region.

Last week, Biden’s top adviser to Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, told reporters that US President Lopez Obrador “personally wants” to be at the summit.

Immigration, Diversity and DD.HH.

This new edition of the Regional Forum is the second organized by the United States since the summit 1994 in Miami, It will have three parallel discussion forums. The first will be a forum of civil society organizations that will begin on Monday and focus on issues related to immigration, diversity and human rights. There will also be a private sector meeting that will go through the economic recovery after the Govt epidemic and the crisis caused by technological change in the region. For the third forum, young people are invited in a hybrid format to discuss climate change, corruption and connectivity.

After all, the eyes are set Leaders meeting. The summit will be, above all, a thermometer for the host country, which will allow it to assess what real influence it currently has on the continent. Nowhere in the known agenda is there any mention of the elephant in China, the region. However, competition with the Asian company is one of the White House’s major concerns.

For the leaders of Latin America and the Caribbean, this would be an estimate. During his four years as president Donald Trump, Washington’s foreign policy toward the United States was, above all, to promote opposition to Cuba and Venezuela and to promote a wall on Mexico’s border. The former president also missed the previous US summit in Peru in 2018. Instead, he sent his deputy Mike Pence.

Biden came to power in January 2021, raising expectations in a region that had felt neglected for the previous four years. The Democrats, who have a long history in American politics, may forge a new relationship. But now, a year and a half after coming to power, he does not have much to show for it on that front. Under his administration, America’s focus was primarily on recovering from it International spread, It caused more than a million deaths in the North American country. At the foreign level, he focuses on seeing what Russia is doing in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine.

This new edition of the US Summit, which begins this Monday, is set to show Biden the true state of relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. For the rest, it will allow Washington to see how much it is willing to do if it wants to compete with China in the region.