America summit: who can come and who can’t?

Disputes over the guest list overshadow the start of the America summit. The US government wants to exclude the authoritarian states of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Other countries are also threatening boycotts. US President Biden faces a dilemma.

Guillermina Zapata keeps the Nicaraguan flag with her son’s bloodstains on her bedside table. She is a kind of relic, the last memory of her son. Francisco took to the streets with this flag on May 30, 2018 to protest against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The 34-year-old was holding it when security forces shot him in the head. “They killed him because he wanted a free Nicaragua,” his mother complains. At least 355 people died in the student protests in 2018, because the Ortega regime bloodily suppressed the demos. The president, says Guillermina, was personally to blame for Francisco’s death because he gave the order to shoot. “The Ortegas kidnapped the country. I don’t know where we’re going to end up.”

“Locked up like in a prison”

In fact, a drama is unfolding in Nicaragua. Ruler Ortega is taking ever harder action against his critics. He overthrew a dictator himself in 1979 and was a revolutionary celebrated by the left worldwide. But in recent years he and his wife Rosario Murillo have turned the country into a dictatorship. Oppositionists are in prison or in exile, while the Ortega-controlled Congress bans NGOs that work for environmental protection, feminism or human rights.

Last week alone, 200 organizations had to close, including the “Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua,” a kind of Nicaraguan language academy of which the well-known writer Gioconda Belli was a member. Belli, Ortega’s former companion, is now one of his harshest critics – she lives in exile in Spain: “The Ortegas want to stay in power at all costs and are suffocating civil society,” says Belli. “We are locked up as a people like in a prison.”

Biden’s choice between plague and cholera

And so US President Joe Biden faces a dilemma at the beginning of the America Summit: Should he invite authoritarian governments like those in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba – or not? The ninth meeting of the continent’s heads of state and government is taking place in Los Angeles, and the agenda is already set: it should be about climate change, clean energy, health and, above all, migration. Thousands of people – especially from authoritarian countries – are trying to enter the United States illegally.

But now the meeting is overshadowed by controversy over the guest list. Because Biden apparently decided that only democratically elected heads of state are welcome. In doing so, he excludes Ortega, Nicolás Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel, who use repression and intimidation to stay in power.

The invitation policy in turn enraged Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who questioned his participation if not all countries are allowed to come. Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras and some Caribbean countries have also expressed criticism. The guest list was unclear until the very end.

Disputes are instrumentalized ideologically

The resistance to Biden’s invitation policy has several reasons: The countries of Latin America insist on meeting the USA on an equal footing. They do not want to be dictated unilaterally who is acceptable and who is not. On the other hand, in the past Cuba was at least invited to the summits in Panama and Peru. The interplay with Cuba complicates the current exclusion.

“There are no clear and comprehensible criteria for this,” says scientist Désirée Reder from the Giga Institute for Latin American Studies. It is therefore hardly surprising that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are exploiting the dispute ideologically for themselves. Ortega condemns the alleged “interventionist, tyrannical, imperialist and terrorist policy of the USA”.

Hope for exchange and networking

But what would be of use to the people of Nicaragua: dialogue or a clear edge? Opinions differ. Writer Belli would like all countries to be represented at the summit: “So far, the only reaction to dictatorships in Latin America has been sanctions and penalties. What’s missing are communication channels with these regimes.” However, she has no hope that the summit will change anything in the short term.

Researcher Reder is currently conducting interviews with Nicaragua’s exile community. “Most,” she says, “would have liked the situation to be condemned much earlier.” Meanwhile, Reder doubts that a dialogue between the US and the Nicaraguan Presidential couple Ortega-Murillo is possible to improve the situation of civil society.

And yet, says Reder, the summit could still be a success. Because in Nicaragua in particular the question arises: what comes after Ortega, who is now in his late 70s? “This is where civil society and the opposition, most of which are in exile, become important.” Because in addition to the main summit of the heads of government, opposition groups and NGOs can also exchange ideas – and this networking is the chance of the summit.