"We have a US President [Obama] who says we should forget the past, but who himself in trapped in the past, he is trapped in a 50 year long blockade on Cuba. ... What was made clear at the summit is that the US has not changed and that Latin America and the Caribbean has changed. We have changed and are changing while remaining firmly anchored to the roots of our history."

Daniel Ortega, President
Nicaraqua 

April 24, 2009

There is general consensus among progressive sectors in Latin America that last weekend's Summit of the Americas, hosted by the government of Trinidad and Tobago, represented a humiliating political defeat for the US government and its agenda for the region. The final declaration (the product of months of discussion coordinated by the Organization of American States, OAS, in close consultation with policy advisers to former US president George W. Bush) was left unsigned due to irreconcilable differences between the vision of the US delegation and its allies and the vision of progressive leaders led by the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America) block. What is more, a number of regional leaders have since suggested that the Trinidad and Tobago Summit is likely to be the last regional summit organized by the OAS given the irrelevance of the forum's antidemocratic structure and mechanisms within today's Latin America where the revolutionary process continues gaining unprecedented ground along the path to true independence.

Even before the summit began the ALBA countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominica and San Vicente) along with Ecuador had announced their decision not to sign the document. The two main reasons given by this block were the exclusion of Cuba from the regional forum and the declaration's lack of viable solutions to the impact on the region of the global economic crisis. During his appearance on Cuban TV's political program Informative Round Table on April 22, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega revealed that various ALBA country governments had proposed amendments to the declaration in the months leading up to the summit but their suggestions had not even been discussed hence the regional block's decision not to sign.

Obama promises change but is unwilling to deliver

Prior to the summit numerous analysts and commentators had coincided in the suggestion that this high level encounter would reveal once and for all the depth of the "change" President Barrack Obama assures us he is planning to implement in terms of US relations with Latin America. Today those same analysts have concluded that the kind of "change" Obama has is mind is entirely superficial. Essentially, Obama's "change" is rhetorical: "We can build a new future, but only if we move forward with a new sense of partnership. ... I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. I am here to launch a new chapter of engagement" (from Obama's address during the inauguration of the summit). As Argentinian writer Carlos Aznárez says in an article written the day after the summit, Obama's amiable words "mean nothing unless accompanied by concrete actions."

The key issue on which Latin American heads of state were pushing for and expecting change was the US policy towards Cuba. There is unanimous consensus among 33 of the 34 member governments of the OAS that Cuba should be invited to join the regional forum and that the US should lift its nearly fifty year long blockade against the Caribbean nation. Other specific requests made by regional leaders were; support to deal with the  impact of the economic crisis; more funding for the fight against drugs; and commitments to make US migration policy more humane and to provide funding to help origin countries reduce the poverty that leads to migration.

Obama made no announcement of any significance on any of these issues. According to Aznárez the US delegation's complete lack of commitment to any real change in US policy on priority issues proves what left wing commentators had suspected, "Obama is just the face at the front of the Empire's subtle and intelligent strategy of dropping the failed sticks and stones policy in order to adopt a policy of sticks and carrots."

As part of his above mentioned appearance on Cuban TV's Informative Round Table President Ortega gave his take on Obama's attempt to enchant the region's leaders into submission: "[As I was listening to his speech] I was saying to myself, he is trying to imitate the Pied Piper of Hamlin, he expects all the rats and mice to skip along behind him - there we all go, off to the precipice, I said to myself. But he didn't achieve his goal."

Obama's call to forget past disagreements rejected by regional leaders

During his inaugural speech, Obama put a lot of emphasis on his opinion that "in order to move forward we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. ... Too often an opportunity to build a fresh partnership in the Americas has been undermined by stale debates ... that would have us make a fake choice between rigid state run economies or unbridled and unregulated capitalism, between blame for right wing paramilitaries or left wing insurgents, between sticking to inflexible policies with regards to Cuba or denying the full human rights that are owed to the Cuban people. ... I did not come here to debate the past. We must learn from history but not be trapped by it."

Superficially Obama's comments may appear measured and reconciliatory. The continuity in terms of unchanged US foreign policy for the region, however, undermines any moral authority these words would at first appear to inspire. With this in mind, the underlying connotation many Latin American leaders have drawn from Obama's proposal of forgetting past disagreements is that his administration refuses to acknowledge the intricate and very relevant ways in which the untold suffering US foreign policy has inflicted on the region's peoples for over a century continues to the dominate the day to day reality for the vast majority of citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean.

President Ortega spoke about this aspect of Obama's speech during the Informative Round Table interview:

"We have a US President who says we should forget the past, but who himself in trapped in the past, he is trapped in a 50 year long blockade on Cuba. ... What was made clear at the summit is that the US has not changed and that Latin America and the Caribbean has changed. We have changed and are changing while remaining firmly anchored to the roots of our history."

Ortega calls on world leaders to develop alternative model to failed capitalism

In his role as President Pro Tempore of the Central American Integration System (SICA) Ortega was one of the five heads of state that spoke during the inauguration session of the Americas Summit. Despite being invited to speak for just ten minutes Ortega gave a fifty minute speech taking advantage of the space provided to communicate the position of the ALBA countries as defined during the Cumaná Summit which came to an end just a few hours before the opening of the Summit of the Americas. Below is an abridged version of his speech including part of the passages he cited from the Cumaná Declaration:

"[Recently] the leaders of the G20 declared that the crisis requires a global solution, but they didn't take into account the developing countries when forming that global solution. That is the reality. ... For this reason it is important [for heads of state from around the world] to attend the meeting that will take place in the UN [General Assembly] between June 1 - 3 so that [we are all present], instead of just the G20 leaders debating the future of humanity. ... It is not correct ... that the G20 should go on taking the major decisions, that the G20 are the ones to go on defining the destiny of our peoples. Therefore ... we must all go to the UN to discuss, to debate, to contribute to the solution to the crisis.

"During the heroic struggle to liberate India from English rule, Mahatma Ghandi said 'England has used up a quarter of the planet's resources in order to reach its current state of development - how many resources would India need to reach the same level of development?'

"In the 21st century and during the last decades of the 20th century, it has not just been England but all the developed capitalist nations who have established their hegemony at the cost of the destruction of the planet and of the human species. ... Therefore the only way to save the planet and [at the same time] create sustainable development for humanity, will be establishing the foundations for a new international economic, social and political order that is truly just and democratic.

"During the ALBA summit in Cumaná we produced a document that states:

The heads of state and of government of Bolivia, Dominicana, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, member countries of ALBA, consider the project of the Declaration of the V Summit of the Americas to be insufficient and unacceptable for the following reasons:

• It does not provide solutions to the global economic crisis despite the fact that this crisis constitutes the biggest challenge that humanity has faced in decades. 
  
  
• It unjustifiably excludes Cuba, without mentioning the general consensus that exists in the region condemning the blockade and the isolation attempts which have been incessantly imposed on the Cuban people and government in a criminal fashion. 

Capitalism is bringing an end to humanity and to the planet. The current crisis is a systemic and structural crisis not just another cyclical crisis. Capitalism has provoked the ecological crisis by subjecting conditions necessary for the continuation of life on the planet to the predominance of the market and of profit.

"... We all want change, but we have to agree what kind of change we want. Do we want changes to maintain the status quo? Do we want changes ... that save a model which has shown itself very good at accumulating wealth and ... expanding poverty? ...

"We are no longer dealing with a matter of ideology, this is not a political issue, it is a matter of survival! If they are set on maintaining the model, if they are set on applying stop gap solutions so as to go on sucking up the entire planet's resources, then the future will be the end of the human species. ... The only way of saving us all is to change the model."

Tortilla con sal