Correa’s Ultimatum and the Summit “of the Americas”

The so-called Summit of the Americas was an initiative of the Bill Clinton administration to impose on Latin America the Free Trade Area of the Americas, an aggressive instrument of economic, political and cultural re-colonization conceived during the George H.W. Bush administration. It recently began to be applied in Mexico in 1994 under the name of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It’s a sign of the change of times — as the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa calls it — that the Free Trade Area of the Americas was defeated at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata. It was a significant event in impeding the annexation of Latin America. This was owed to the great popular mobilizations against neoliberal policies, manifested in the decision of presidents Néstor Kirchner, Hugo Chávez and Lula da Silva. A new situation of independence, unity and regional integration emerged with mechanisms like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, the Union of South American Nations and, more recently, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and a growing rejection of the inhumane policies of the free market.

In this context and returning to Correa, in a very cordial letter sent to his Colombian counterpart Juan Manuel Santos on April 2, the Ecuadorian sets out the reasons for why, after much reflection, he had arrived to the decision to not attend the Summit of the Americas until decisions that the Patria Grande (Great Fatherland) demands of us are made. In an obvious allusion to the absence of Cuba, he specifies that “a meeting from which an American nation is intentionally and unjustly exiled cannot be labeled Summit of the Americas.” There has been talk of lack of consensus, he adds, but we all know this is about the veto of the hegemonic nations, an intolerable situation in our 21st century America. The hegemonic nations Correa refers to are none other than the United States and Canada, as no Latin American or Caribbean nation opposes Cuba on a hemispheric scale, as the election for chairmanship of the next period of CELAC demonstrates; or the meeting of the Organization of American States in Honduras, where it was agreed that the unjust and immoral agreement that excluded Cuba should be repealed. It was a moral and legal reparation since Havana was not interested in returning to the Organization of American States due to its infamous trajectory as a protector of military dictatorships and aggressions and imperialist occupations in our America.

Correa adds that it is unacceptable to sidestep at these summits issues of the inhumane embargo on Cuba as well as the abhorrent colonization of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands), which have deserved the nearly-unanimous rejection of the world’s nations.

It is worth remembering that at the 11th Alba Summit (Caracas, Feb. 4 and 5), the Ecuadorian president proposed that the nations in the forum boycott the meeting of the West Indies in Cartagena if Cuba was not invited. Notwithstanding that the summit did not make a final decision about members’ attendance, Chávez agreed with Correa that if Cuba was not invited, the proposal shoud be considered. He suggested consulting Colombian leader Juan Manuel Santos in his capacity as host. Santos declared that it did not depend on him and that a consensus ought to be reached. He had not even finished saying so when a spokesperson of the State Department affirmed that Cuba did not qualify to attend. President Raúl Castro specified at the Caracas summit that he would never have asked to attend the Summit, but that was before the invitation of the host nation. Due to this, when asked in Havana by the Colombian chancellor María Ángela Holguín about Cuban interest in participating, his response was affirmative. In his following trip to the island (that did not at all please the empire), Santos explained that consensus had not been reached, but he made a friendly gesture, saying that he would modify the decision Washington made to exclude Cuba.

In the Cartagena meeting, Cuba’s attendance at the Summit going forward will not only be demanded by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas members taking part. Argentina, Brazil and Peru, the members of the Caribbean Community and Colombia itself, as Santos promised, will also do so. Pursuant to the agreement reached at by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in 2011, the lifting of the embargo will be demanded of Obama. The U.S. leader will be attending this summit without having fulfilled his promise at the previous summit in 2009 of a change in U.S. policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, he will be on the defensive from the beginning. I suspect this will be the last Summit of the Americas.

P.S. The Malvinas are Argentinean.