Summit of the Americas: Our reporter’s search for something to hope for

It was the moment that those of us covering the Fifth Summit of the Americas were waiting for.

Just months into his presidency in April 2009, Barack Obama was signaling a new kind of U.S. leadership in the Western Hemisphere by meeting and chatting with regional socialist bad boy Hugo Chávez at the gathering in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

The two leaders shook hands and smiled, and Mr. Chávez took the opportunity to slip the American a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic tome on imperialism in the region, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

Later an unfazed President Obama would tell us that rather than wagging a finger at Mr. Chávez over the direction he was taking Venezuela, he had simply thanked him for the book. “He knows I’m a reader,” he said.

Indeed, two Americas summits later – in Panama in April 2015 – Mr. Obama would break the taboo dating from the first summit in Miami in 1994 and acquiesce to the regional clamor for communist Cuba to be allowed to attend a gathering whose invitation list is based on democratic governance and a free-market economy.

Cuba had neither, but that did not stop Mr. Obama from smiling for the press cameras as he shook Cuban leader Raúl Castro’s hand in Panama City.

Those are the moments we journalists focused on at these hemispheric summits, and for two reasons.

First, because they helped illustrate how U.S. leadership and interest in the Americas was evolving. But second, because the truth was that – especially by the time Mr. Obama was in the White House, but even as early as the post-9/11 first-term years of George W. Bush – not much else was happening at the meetings.

I have attended six of the past eight Summits of the Americas – the ninth is being hosted by President Joe Biden in Los Angeles this week – and at some point I came to the conclusion that the SOTAs, as they are called in diplo speak, peaked early.

Indeed, it may not be going too far to say that the summits reached their high point with the inaugural Miami gathering.

The Spirit of Miami

Miami had crackled with excitement and anticipation for where the summit process could take the hemisphere. President Bill Clinton led the proceedings, which focused on the goal of creating a free-trade area “from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.”

With South America’s military dictatorships having been replaced with democratically elected leaders, and the region’s guerrilla wars largely quieted (Colombia remaining an exception), the summit could proceed with all countries from Canada to Argentina and Chile in attendance – save for Cuba.

The summit even played a role in transforming Miami from a fading pastel beach town to a hub of Latin American enterprise, as political scientist Eduardo Gamarra of Florida International University used to relish telling me.

My curtain-raiser on Miami carried the headline, “The Bonding Of a Continent,” and featured this lead quote from then-Costa Rican President José María Figueres Olsen: “If just 10 years ago someone had said today we would have a continent of democratically elected governments promoting their economic development through free trade, we would have said it was not possible.”

My post-summit story’s headline read: “Task for Americas Leaders: Keep Spirit of Miami Summit Alive.”

But with only a few exceptions, that task went unfulfilled, and the “spirit of Miami” went cold – the victim of 9/11 and the United States’ focus on a new national security threat; growing opposition to a hemispheric free-trade accord; and rising public dissatisfaction with democracy’s ability to deliver.

Leaders assembled at the 2001 summit in Quebec City did direct their diplomats to come up with an Inter-American Democratic Charter, which would strengthen the region’s commitment to democratic governance. The document was adopted at an Organization of American States special session – on Sept. 11, 2001.

But beyond that, most subsequent summits were marked more by dissension and public rejection than unity.

Two visions of freedom

At Mar de Plata, Argentina, in 2005, large anti-globalization and anti-free-trade demonstrations were the main event outside, while inside a growing list of countries was now balking at the Miami commitment to create a hemispheric free-trade area.

Indeed, some demonstrators I spoke with on the streets assured me that the bonfires they set symbolized the FTA going up in smoke. They turned out to be right.

The Mar de Plata summit was also an opportunity for me to contrast two visions of freedom as embodied by two of the hemisphere’s controversial figures: President Bush, who two years before the summit had launched the Iraq war ostensibly to bring freedom to the Iraqi people and the wider Middle East; and Argentine native son Ernesto “Che” Guevara, champion of freedom from imperialist domination.

Mr. Bush touted freedom of the individual, I wrote in a pre-summit story from Buenos Aires, while Che championed the collective freedom of socialism.

And in Argentina, where average folks I interviewed on the street still spoke in terms of “our Che,” Mr. Bush didn’t have a chance.

President Obama, who normalized relations with Cuba and shook hands with everybody, sat better with people across Latin America, and his appearances at Americas summits attested to that. Still, he could never shake the deepening conviction among many in the region that, on the whole, the hemisphere just didn’t matter much to Washington anymore.

That image of an increasingly benign but distracted hegemon would come crashing down with President Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, alarmed the region by resurrecting mention of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine to assert Washington’s primacy in the hemisphere – only now with Chinese and Russian meddling in the region in mind rather than European powers.

Before long, national security adviser John Bolton would be imploring Mr. Trump to “reassert the Monroe Doctrine,” while the president would further alarm the region by threatening to send the U.S. military into Venezuela and to the U.S.-Mexico border – a sure sign he held to the Monroe premise that the U.S. had every right to intervene in its sphere of influence.

That position was hardly a winner across Latin America – to the point that when the Summit of the Americas rolled around in Peru in 2018, Mr. Trump did not even bother to attend. Vice President Mike Pence was sent instead, but his reception was frosty – signaling the depths to which U.S. relations with the region had plunged.

Ironically, it was the Trump administration that agreed to have the U.S. play host this year.

The A team

The Biden administration seemed to get off to a slow and rocky start in its summit planning, but the White House is signaling the gathering’s importance by sending the A team to LA.

Attending with Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris will focus on migration issues, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken will address press freedom and meet with young entrepreneurs from across the hemisphere. USAID Administrator Samantha Power will take on regional food insecurity and women’s empowerment.

One measure of the summit’s ultimate success may be whether President Biden, who is known to thrive on personal relationships, manages to hit it off with any of the hemisphere’s leaders.

I will be watching in particular for any signs of rapport established between Mr. Biden, with his years of experience in the region, and Chile’s new and young socialist president, Gabriel Boric.

Mr. Boric has already said he plans to let Mr. Biden know that his exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the summit over those countries’ lack of democracy and poor human rights records was a “mistake.”

But I’m hoping the bearded former student protest leader also presents the U.S. president with a book, say a collection of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s work. That would give journalists something insightful to write about.

Howard LaFranchi is the Monitor’s longtime diplomatic correspondent and a former Latin America bureau chief.