Analysis: Drugs and Cuba top American agenda

THE Summit of the Americas, which takes place roughly every three years, could be viewed as the sort of Latin American boondoggle that convenes heads of state for a few days, either south or north of the Rio Grande, to make endless speeches that lead nowhere.

But every now and then, the Summit actually helps to place key issues on the hemispheric table.

One such issue was the so-called Free-Trade Area of the Americas, which was proposed by former US president George HW Bush in 1990, and then collapsed at the Mar del Plata summit in Argentina in 2005. Incensed by the presence of Bush père’s son, president George W Bush, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez rallied thousands of anti-American demonstrators to protest against the agreement.

The Summit of the Americas thus serves as a bellwether of United States-Latin American relations, even if it fails to accomplish much of significance.

This year’s summit, which will take place in Cartagena, Colombia, in mid-April, has already generated controversy. Two traditional hot-button issues will dominate the discussions: Cuba and drugs.

Cuba has never been invited to the Summit of the Americas, because the meeting was designed to include only members of the Organization of American States (OAS) and democratically elected presidents.

In February, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, declared that if Cuban president Raúl Castro were not invited to the Summit, the ALBA countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some of the Caribbean islands) would not attend. This was clearly intended to provoke the US, Canada, and a handful of other countries opposed to his presence.

Several Latin American leaders and commentators recommended that US president Barack Obama attend, despite Castro’s presence, in order to confront him about Cuba’s dearth of democracy. Obama did not take the bait.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos tried to defuse the issue by first ascertaining whether the Cubans actually wanted to be invited. Having sent his foreign minister to Havana to ask, he received a surprising response: Cuba did wish to attend, despite having rejected in 2009 an invitation to return to the OAS.

It was clear to Santos that, if Castro attended, the Cartagena summit would take place without Obama, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, and perhaps a few other heads of state. If, on the other hand, Castro did not attend, some of the ALBA members, including two neighbours with which Colombia hopes to improve relations – Ecuador and Venezuela – might not show up, either.

In the end, Santos, like his summit-hosting predecessors, had no choice but to inform the Cubans personally that they were not welcome, as “there was no consensus regarding their participation”.

Because Obama will be present, other leaders may seize the opportunity to share with him their views on what is increasingly called the “failed war on drugs,” the anti-drug programme originally launched by US president Richard Nixon in 1971. Recently inaugurated Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, together with Santos and other heads of state, question today’s punitive, prohibitionist approach, owing to its enormous costs and meager results, and propose a different strategy: legalisation.

Obama sent vice president Joe Biden to Mexico and Central America a few weeks ago to forestall this trend, and he may have partly succeeded. Nevertheless, whereas only a smattering of political leaders and intellectuals advocated legalisation in the past, nowadays officials are coming “out of the closet” on drugs in their droves.

But Obama has other priorities. His foreign-policy challenges, with the exception of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment programme and Israel’s reaction to it, come second to the US economy’s health, and its impact on his re-election. Latin America – even Mexico – is not on his radar screen at the moment.

• Jorge G Castañeda was Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs from 2000-2003, after joining with his ideological opponent, president Vicente Fox, to create the country’s first democratic government.