Summit of the Americas concludes with widening gap between Latin America and U.S./Canada

The following two articles report on the triannual meeting of the Summit of the Americas held in Colombia April 14, 15 2012. You can also watch a 15 minute interview about the Summit with Alex Main of the Center for Economic Policy Research on Real News Network at the embed link or here.

Regional summit’s future in doubt without Cuba

By Sibylla Brodzinsky, The Miami Herald, April 16, 2012
Although President Juan Manuel Santos declared a summit of 30 nations from the Americas a success because thorny issues, including Cuba, were dealt with “frankness,” the leaders’ failure to reach agreement cast doubt on the future of such regional
meetings.

On the sidelines of the summit, Santos and Obama held a bilateral meeting after which they announced May 15 as the date when a free trade agreement between the two countries will officially take effect.

The summit concluded Sunday with no formal declaration and no signing ceremony. However, Santos said the leaders had chosen to discuss behind closed doors “the issues that unite us as well as the issues that divide us in a sincere dialogue.”

Santos said that the majority of the countries represented at the summit, “support the participation of Cuba” in the summit process. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper were alone in their opposition.

Santos announced that the next summit would be held in Panama in 2015 but countries of the ALBA bloc of Latin American nations -- founded by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004 -- announced Sunday they would not participate in another Summit of the Americas without Cuba’s inclusion. The bloc also demanded that the United States end its economic embargo of the island.

The ALBA bloc includes Antigua and Barbados, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Haiti has observer status within the ALBA. The presidents of Bolivia and Argentina left the meeting before it concluded Sunday, and the leaders of Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Haiti did not show up.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón hailed the fact that discussions on Cuba and drug policy were even held, marking a “radical and unthinkable” difference with previous summits.

On drug policy, the leaders agreed to direct the Organization of American States to begin a thorough review of drug control policy in the region. “We emphasized the possibility of exploring alternatives with consumer countries, ” said the president of Mexico, where nearly 50,000 people have been killed in the past six years in drug trafficking related violence. The OAS review, he said, will seek to analyze alternatives.

Eric Hershberg, director of the Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, said that an agreement to have the OAS look at the issue was a “step forward” in the U.S. position toward the issue. Obama said in a business leaders forum before the summit that a discussion on drug policy was “legitimate”.

Following the summit, Santos and Obama met privately at the Colombian presidential vacation home in this Caribbean coastal city, where they announced the implementation of the free trade agreement between the two countries. U.S. and Colombian unions have opposed the trade deal, saying Colombia still has not cleaned up its record of human rights and labor rights abuses. The two countries signed a Labor Action Plan in April 2011 laying out steps the Colombian government needed to take to improve the rights of workers.

The National Labor School, an organization that tracks labor issues in Colombia, said in a statement that nine of the 37 measures laid out in the action plan had not been implemented. The others, the organization said, have been applied only partially. “There continue to be worrying situations of attacks on unionists and restriction to the right of association.” Between April 7, 2011, when the action plan was signed, and April 13, 2012, some 28 union members have been killed, 10 have suffered attempts on their lives, two have been forcibly disappeared, and nearly 500 have received death threats, according to the National Labor School.

Obama’s visit to Cartagena was marred by a prostitution scandal involving 11 Secret Service men and five members of the military who formed part of the president’s security team in Colombia. Obama said Sunday that the director of the Secret Service is investigating the scandal. “I expect that investigation to be thorough and I expect it to be rigorous. If it turns out that that the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry,” Obama said in his first comments on the scandal, made during a press conference with Santos.

“We’re representing the people of the United States and when we travel to another country, I expect us to observe the highest standards, because we’re not just representing ourselves, we’re here on behalf of our people--and that means we conduct ourselves with the utmost dignity and probity. And obviously what’s been reported doesn’t match up to those standards.”

Canada’s Cuba policy makes no sense

Commentary by Jonathan Kay, National Post,  April 16, 2012
Stephen Harper went to this weekend’s Organization of American States (OAS) summit with the declared goal of improving Canadian trade opportunities in Latin America. Instead, he and Barack Obama acted as spoilers in the face of an otherwise unified push to include Cuba at the next summit, scheduled for 2015 in Panama.

The optics are bad — colonialist, even: Two gringos from the north swooping down to tell the locals whom they get to invite to their own party. Leftist leaders in the region, already predisposed to anti-American sentiment, were only too happy to play the news for demagogic effect: “All the countries here … want Cuba to be present. But the United States won’t accept,” declared Bolivian President Evo Morales on Saturday. “It’s like a dictatorship.”

The most defensible explanation for Mr. Harper’s stance is that he is simply engaging in realpolitik. By standing alongside Mr. Obama, he has given cover to an American president seeking re-election — a favour that might be cashed in one day for a favourable ruling on the Keystone XL pipeline, or some other tangible trade-related concession.

And yes, to the extent they notice, American hawks no doubt will applaud the sight of Mr. Harper once again standing by America. But Canadians themselves might be confused: What exactly is our government’s position on Cuba?

To wit: If I can legally hop on a plane to Havana tomorrow, or go load up on Habanos Montecristos here in downtown Toronto, why exactly is my government campaigning to keep Cuba’s leadership out of a forum supposedly open to all Western Hemispheric governments? (The OAS once enforced a policy excluding Cuba from participation. But the 1962 resolution on which that policy was based was itself declared void three years ago.)

Mr. Obama, of course, has nothing to explain. The policy of the United States has, since the last days of the Eisenhower administration, been one of near-total embargo. Which is why the Montecristos that Americans smoke come from the Dominican Republic.

It’s been a failed policy: The Castro regime has survived the administrations of not only Eisenhower, but also eight other presidents besides. But at least it is a failed policy that is officially sanctioned by U.S. law, and which enjoys fairly broad support.

Canada, on the other hand, has no such embargo: Not only do we trade with Havana, but we buy up nearly a quarter of all Cuban exports (putting us in the #2 spot, narrowly behind China). We are also #5 on the list of Cuban import sources. Canadian-Cuban relations are especially intense every winter, when hundreds of thousands of pasty Canadians dispatch themselves to sun spots in Cayo Coco and Varadero for their annual dose of Caribbean sunshine.

If Mr. Harper really thinks that an American-style embargo is the best approach to fighting (the very real) human-rights abuses in Cuba — which, let us not forget, stands as the Western hemisphere’s only remaining communist dictatorship — then he should use his majority power in Parliament to ban all trade in Cuban goods and services. He could be Canada’s Helms and Burton all rolled into one.

Short of that, he could direct his bureaucrats to stop the flow of official Canadian federal aid to the island. In the last reporting year, the Canadian International Development Agency disbursed $6.47-million on Cuba. According to CIDA’s web site, the agency is (among other projects) “increasing agricultural diversification, productivity and competitiveness, emphasizing the poorer provinces. CIDA also provides advice to the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture on modern economic models for increasing productivity.”

But our Prime Minister hasn’t done any of that. So the question presents itself: If we’re willing to sit down with communist farm managers to instruct them on “modern economic models for increasing productivity,” and on our own dime no less, why kick up a fuss about Cuba’s involvement at the Summit of the Americas?

What’s the principle at work here?

My own view is that the U.S. embargo has been an embarrassing failure — exceeded only in scope by the failure in the War on Drugs (another sticking point at the weekend summit, but a subject that deserves its own column); and that we should deal with Cuba the same way we deal with China: Crack the communist nut open through the tyranny-corroding power of trade and capitalism. But even those who take the opposite view must find the Canadian position a tad bizarre: On one hand, we love our Cuban tans and cigars. On the other hand, we’ll posture as hard-ass Helms-Burton types when the U.S. President happens to be in the room.

From either side of the Straits of Florida, it makes no sense.