Obama Will Dedicate April to Latin America

U.S. president Barack Obama will dedicate April to Latin America. He is scheduled to host his Mexican and Brazilian counterparts in the White House and to travel to Colombia in the middle of the month to take part in the Summit of the Americas.

This Monday, Obama will meet with Mexican president Felipe Calderon for the summit between leaders of the three member nations of NAFTA. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper will also participate.

The NAFTA summit was supposed to take place last November in Honolulu, Hawaii, but was postponed for Calderon, who cancelled his trip after his Interior Minister, Francisco Blake, was killed in a helicopter crash. According to the White House, Obama, Calderon and Harper will speak this Monday in Washington about economic growth, energy and public safety.

Since taking the White House in January 2009, Obama has held five bilateral meetings with Calderon, the last being in Washington in March 2011. This reflects the importance that the U.S. gives to its relations with Mexico, marked by the fight against drug trafficking and illegal immigration.

On April 9, one week after the summit with Calderon and Harper, Obama will be the host once more to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

For Rousseff, who hosted Obama in Brazil in March of 2011, this will be her first official visit to the U.S. as president. The visit will be focused on trade, energy and business, as both administrations have anticipated.

The situation in Syria and how Brazil could help to strengthen international pressure on Bashar al-Assad’s regime may be another issue that Obama and Rousseff will address, as was recently suggested by Mike Hammer, the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs.

According to the White House, Brazil and the U.S. will also try to take advantage of the occasion to promote regional integration on the eve of the Sixth Summit of the Americas, which will take place in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, on April 14 and 15.

It will be the second continental summit to be attended by Obama after the one that took place in 2009 in Trinidad and Tobago. Its objective is to expand trade throughout the continent as well as boost cooperation with regards to energy and security.

In Cartagena, Obama will have to deal with the debate over the presence of Cuba in future Summits of the Americas, after having failed to reach a consensus to invite the country to the summit hosted by Colombia.

The only administration that has openly refused to invite Cuba to Cartagena is the United States. They say that the Caribbean country does not meet the requirements for democracy established by the participants in the 2001 Summit of the Americas.

At the end of the summit, Obama will meet with Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos to discuss “a broad spectrum of bilateral, regional and global matters,”* according to the White House.

They both want to revise the developments around the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement so that they can start the bilateral plan of action. The agreement was signed in 2006 and approved by the U.S. Congress this past October.

Calderon and Rousseff’s visits to Washington, as well as the trip to Colombia, can serve as recognition for Obama so he may continue to count on the support of the United States’ Latino community in the face of the November 6 presidential elections.

The polls show that Hispanics continue to prefer Obama over all of the hopeful Republicans despite the fact that the president has not fulfilled his 2008 campaign promise to carry out immigration reform.

The “renewed relations” with Latin America that he promised in Trinidad and Tobago in 2009 have not materialized either, according to analysts. The region was the most overlooked issue in the State of the Union address that he gave before Congress last January.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.