The Biden Administration is currently meeting in Los Angeles with heads of state and representatives from across the Western Hemisphere for the ninth-annual Summit of the Americas.
The meetings have been held since 1994 to bring together leaders of countries that are members of the Organization of the American States, but this year’s summit finds key allies of the United States absent from the meeting.
The controversy ahead of the summit and the contradictory nature of whom the Biden Administration invited is overshadowing the summit.
Those not attending include Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who announced Monday that he would not attend due to the fact that certain other countries were being excluded. On May 27, López Obrador had raised the question, “Is it going to be the Summit of the Americas or is it going to be the Friends of America Summit?”
The Biden Administration justified the exclusion of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba due to their records regarding democracy and human rights, despite Cuba and Nicaragua having both attended previous summits, with Cuba attending for the first time in 2015 during the Obama presidency. These countries condemned their exclusion from the summit, issuing a joint statement saying that they “reject the exclusions and discriminatory treatment at the so-called Summit of the Americas.”
Other countries have followed López Obrador’s example and declined to attend the summit out of protest, including Bolivia. Chile and Argentina also protested the exclusion of these Latin American countries from the summit, but heads of state for both countries, Gabriel Boric and Alberto Fernández, respectively, are still attending.
Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei declined to attend, but sent his Foreign Minister Mario Búcaro in his place. The administration of Xiomara Castro of Honduras, too, sent Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina to attend in her place. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whose relationship with the Biden Administration has soured as he takes increasingly authoritarian actions, is sending Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill.
Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bossonaro threatened to not attend the Summit but later announced he would be attending and meeting directly with President Joe Biden.
This is the first summit to be held in the United States since 1994. Key topics include migration, democracy, and efforts to build up support against the spread of China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. Vice President Kamala Harris, who will also attend the summit, has been charged with overseeing the response to the region’s increasing migration crisis.
Countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia have seen backslides in their respect for human rights; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Brazil have also seen significant regressions in democratic institutions; and other countries, such as Peru, have seen a prolonged crisis following the 2021 election of President Pedro Castillo.
But the controversy ahead of the summit and the contradictory nature of whom the Biden Administration invited is overshadowing the summit.
Several Central American governments have increasingly taken a hard-line, Trump-like, authoritarian position, leading to a more hostile position toward the Biden Administration and Democrats as a whole. This is the case for Guatemala and the United States, once long-term allies, as the country seeks to find favor with Trumpian Republicans.
“It is the worst moment for bilateral relations since at least the 1986 return of democracy in Guatemala,” Edgar Gutiérrez, former foreign minister of Guatemala during the administration of Alfonso Portillo (2002-2004), tells The Progressive.
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei announced on May 17 that they would not be attending the meeting following the Biden Administration’s criticisms of the controversial re-election of Attorney General Consuelo Porras. Giammattei requested that the United States respect his country’s “sovereignty.”
“He told the media that [the United States] was not going to invite him [to the Summit of the Americas] and since they were not going to invite him, then he had already announced that he was not going to attend,” Gutiérrez says.
Just days after Giammattei’s announcement, he received the official invitation to the summit, which was made public by the president’s office of social communication.
Many fragile Central American democracies are seeing a rapid dissolution of institutions of justice and governance leading to a new authoritarianism returning to the region, which finds inspiration in former President Donald Trump.
“[Giammattei] and his people are very confident that they will have Trump back,” Gutiérrez explains.
Guatemala has seen the rapid regression of the rule of law and anti-corruption efforts. At the same time, legal actions against human rights activists, journalists, and former investigators and prosecutors who investigated corruption cases are expanding. This has pushed many into exile.
The rise of Trump in the United States generated a new far-right reaction to both liberal and progressive politics in the region, as seen in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Brazil. These same trends are emerging elsewhere, such as in the 2021 election in Chile, where progressive candidate Gabriel Boric won the presidential election over far-right candidate José Antonio Kast in an election cycle rife with fascist symbolism.
This new authoritarian trend is steeped in far-right conspiracy theories and neo-fascist ideologies that challenge the region’s progress on reproductive rights, social justice, and inclusion for the LGBTQ+ community. This ideological divide was highlighted in a conversation between Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and investigators from the far-right Heritage Foundation, which was published in the Washington Examiner.
In the interview, Giammattei suggested that the Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, William Popp, sought to overthrow his administration. He also accused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) of promoting “Indigenism” in Guatemala through their projects to support impoverished rural communities. “They want to topple my government,” Giammattei said.
As a result, he threatened to expel USAID from the country. His comments reflect his own deep-seated racism against Guatemala’s Indigenous populations, a sentiment shared by the country’s military and economic elite.
“This is a narrative between conspiracies, and what’s more, it creates adherence,” Renzo Rosal, a Guatemalan independent political analyst, tells The Progressive. It is a conspiracy that reflects the idea that permeated the internal armed conflict, that the Indigenous peoples are rising up, and threatening the ill-gotten wealth of the elite, he adds.
“This plays as an amplifier for those same conspiracy theories they have [in the United States], but also playing with our own conspiracy theories here,” Rosal says. “The idea that the left is getting stronger, and all of those types of narratives that are internally created, that are created here.”
USAID and the Guatemalan government issued a joint statement on June 3 saying that they are continuing to work together. But in spite of this, the backwards slide in Guatemala is going to continue, according to Gutiérrez. “Nothing is going to change,” he says. “The sanctions are going to continue and are going to increase.”
Guatemala, he adds, is “a shell of democracy.”