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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Sunday that no nation in the Western Hemisphere should be left out of the upcoming Summit of the Americas, directly refuting Washington's attempt to bar Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from the U.S.-hosted meeting.
"Nobody should exclude anyone," Lopez Obrador said during a public event in Cuba, according toReuters.
The Mexican leader's remarks come as the U.S. State Department has indicated that government representatives from three Latin American countries are unlikely to be invited to the June summit in Los Angeles.
"Cuba, Nicaragua, the [Nicolas] Maduro regime [in Venezuela] do not respect the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and therefore I don't expect their presence," Western Hemisphere Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols said in an interview last week.
"It's [U.S. President Joe Biden's] decision," Nichols added, "but I think the president has been very clear about the presence of countries that by their actions do not respect democracy--they will not receive invitations."
Following Obama-era efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the Trump administration adopted more than 200 policies designed to punish the Caribbean island. Despite Democratic lawmakers' pleas and Biden's own campaign pledge to reverse his predecessor's "failed" approach, the White House has implemented additional sanctions in recent months.
Speaking from Havana on Sunday, Lopez Obrador vowed to continue pushing the U.S. to lift its 60-year embargo on Cuba.
Meanwhile, Biden has described the 2021 reelection of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, as fraudulent.
U.S. President Joe Biden was nearly the victim of a right-wing coup on January 6, but that didn't stop him from inviting Venezuela's right-wing coup leader Juan Guaido to the United States' so-called "Summit for Democracy"--a development that critics say illustrates the "cynical, hypocritical, and completely counter-productive" nature of the upcoming meeting.
On Tuesday afternoon, David Adler, general coordinator of Progressive International, argued during an appearance on Al Jazeera that the Biden administration lacks the credibility to lead an international effort to protect democracy for a variety of reasons, including the United States' past and present support for authoritarian leaders who further capitalist class interests.
Around the same time, Biden, whose 2020 electoral victory was almost overturned by a pro-Trump mob and lawmakers from the increasingly anti-democratic GOP, invited Guaido, a key player in the unsuccessful Trump-backed effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in 2019, to the Summit for Democracy hosted virtually by the White House from December 9-10.
"Surreal," is how Adler responded after news broke that Biden had asked Guaido--an unelected and unpopular opposition figure who participated in a failed coup attempt--to represent Venezuela at an ostensibly pro-democracy gathering, just weeks after Venezuelans reelected Maduro in a contest that U.S. legal observers called fair.
\u201cBiden has invited Venezuelan opposition figure (to say leader would be a stretch) Juan Guaid\u00f3 to a virtual \u201csummit of democracies\u201d\n\nGuaid\u00f3 doesn\u2019t hold any public office & competing opposition parties outperformed his coalition in recent elections https://t.co/iMn8IUSWQM\u201d— Anya Parampil (@Anya Parampil) 1638291293
Notably, in the wake of the deadly January 6 insurrection, Maduro's government issued a public statement that condemned then-U.S. President Donald Trump's brazen attempt to hold onto power, expressed sympathy for victims of the assault, and criticized Washington for routinely supporting efforts to subvert democracy abroad.
U.S. lawmakers from both major parties, by contrast, gave Guaido a standing ovation when Trump, during his 2020 State of the Union Address, erroneously described the self-anointed leader as the "true and legitimate president of Venezuela."
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The U.S. has an extensive history of imperialism, and in his Al Jazeera appearance Tuesday, Adler pointed to its ongoing abuses of power throughout the world, as well as the fact that its policies rarely reflect the will of the majority, to explain why Biden's summit is "cynical, hypocritical, and completely counter-productive."
Although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has promoted the Summit for Democracy, he plays a key role in facilitating corruption in countries across the globe, said Adler. "We are the central node, for example, in a network of illegal, kleptocratic finance that passes through our financial system en route to financing those autocratic regimes... rising around the world."
In addition, Adler questioned why only 100 world leaders were invited to Biden's table. "We've been here before," Adler said, alluding to the fact that the world was divided into supposedly good and bad camps during the Cold War, with disastrous effects that persist today.
In a co-authored essay published by The Guardian in December 2020, Adler and Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, argued that because it is "animated by an antagonistic impulse, the Summit for Democracy is liable to make the world less safe."
"It risks hardening antagonism with those outside the summit, reducing prospects for truly broad collaboration," the pair wrote. "The coronavirus, this generation's deadliest foe to date, pays no heed to whom the U.S. deems its ally or its adversary. The same is true of a changing climate."
In addition, Adler said Tuesday, the U.S. has a "systematic inability to pick good allies abroad."
Adler went on to repeat points that he and Guillaume Long, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and former foreign minister of Ecuador, made last month in an essay introducing Progressive International's new global observatory to defend democracy.
"The Biden administration continues to put the U.S. on the wrong side" of what Blinken has called a "democratic reckoning" in the Americas, the pair wrote in The Guardian.
For example, the pair noted, Blinken recently "lavished praise" on the right-wing presidents of Ecuador and Colombia, who have engaged in anti-democratic repression. Moreover, the U.S. remains a "leading member" of the Organization of American States, which has facilitated multiple anti-democratic interventions in Haiti and played a decisive role in the far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019.
On top of those foreign policy failures, Adler said Tuesday that Biden's "betrayed campaign promises" at home exemplify the absence of substantive democracy in the U.S.
Many voters cast ballots for the president based on his pledge to ban the sale of new fossil fuel leases on public lands and waters, Adler pointed out, and yet his administration has approved drilling permits at a faster rate than its two immediate predecessors and last month held the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history, just days after Biden vowed at COP26 that he would address the climate crisis.
In light of the current barrage of voter suppression laws being enacted and gerrymandered maps being drawn by state-level Republicans nationwide, an annual study published last week for the first time characterized the U.S. as a "backsliding" democracy.
Although Biden has acknowledged that U.S. democracy is under threat, he has yet to make a strong public push for repealing or reforming the Senate's 60-vote filibuster rule, a prerequisite to passing voting rights legislation.
In their essay, Adler and Wertheim argued that "rather than fixate on the symptoms of democratic discontent--the 'populists, nationalists, and demagogues' whom Biden has pledged to confront--his administration should attack the disease."
"He can start with political and economic reforms to make democratic government respond again to the popular will," they wrote. "Second, the United States should make peace in the world, rather than wage its endless wars... Finally, the United States should reinvent a system of international cooperation undivided by the 'democratic' fault line that the summit seeks to impose."
A delegation of observers from a New York City-based progressive legal group on Wednesday pushed back against the Biden administration's claims about Venezuela's recent regional elections in which allies of President Nicolas Maduro's socialist party were largely victorious.
"We observed a balanced and transparent voting process which voters expressed confidence in."
Allies of Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) secured 20 out of 23 governorships in the November 21 elections. The opposition coalition United Democratic Table (MUD) candidates succeeded in the Cojedes and Zulia states while Neighbors Force (FV) won in the Nueva Esparta State.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) delegation--among various international observers who traveled to Venezuela for the elections--shared its findings in a statement that began, "We observed a balanced and transparent voting process which voters expressed confidence in."
Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the more conservative American Bar Association, the NLG sent eight observers to 12 sites in the Venezeulan capital Caracas as well as provinces in Miranda and La Guaira states.
"Overall we observed a climate of political energy grounded in an understanding that the voting day process, regardless of one's individual political ideology, functions fairly and is received as legitimate," the group said. "Also, we observed that the level of voter participation--almost 42% of registered voters in the context of a nonpresidential election, Covid-19, and severe economic sanctions--is significant and worthy of note."
The NLG said that "from a technical point of view, we observed an electoral system that was fundamentally transparent and facilitated by a workforce (poll workers, coordinators, table presidents) with strong technical competence regarding the functioning of the machines and the integrated election systems."
After speaking with voters at all sites, the NLG observers found that those "aligned with opposition parties also expressed confidence in the voting system. Additionally, the participation of opposition parties at polling sites, including as witnesses in opening and closing processes, strengthened the process and underscored the legitimacy of election results."
The NLG statement continued:
At a number of points throughout the day we witnessed voters frustrated with the heat, "wait times," some technical malfunctions, and occasionally with some confusion finding themselves on the voter rolls. These instances were not the norm at the sites we visited and therefore do not find that these incidents amount to systemic flaws or election "irregularities." Instead, they appear to be part of a complex, far-reaching, and broad election system intended to be accessible in all corners of a country of almost 29 million people, while under U.S. sanctions.
"We are clear that in all parts of the world, including in the United States, there exist Election Day dynamics which can complicate the electoral process, but which do not undermine or delegitimize an open and free process such as this," said NLG delegate Vladimir Martinez.
The European Union also sent election monitors to Venezuela. They expressed concerns about the disqualification of some opposition candidates and the death of a voter in a shooting near a polling station but also highlighted improvements, according to the Associated Press.
"The regional and municipal elections of November 21 were a first and crucial test for the return of most of the opposition parties to the elections in Venezuela," the E.U.'s initial report said. "The electoral process showed the persistence of structural deficiencies, although electoral conditions improved compared to the three previous national elections."
\u201cToday is election day in #Venezuela. 300 observers from 55 countries are here to observe the process. \n\nI'll be an observer alongside these ladies from the National Lawyers Guild @NLGnews @aymeraykuh @scribblscribbl @MintPressNews\u201d— Mnar Adley (@Mnar Adley) 1637496974
In a lengthy statement Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that "the Maduro regime deprived Venezuelans yet again of their right to participate in a free and fair electoral process."
"Fearful of the voice and vote of Venezuelans, the regime grossly skewed the process to determine the result of this election long before any ballots had been cast," Blinken said. "Arbitrary arrests and harassment of political and civil society actors, criminalization of opposition parties' activities, bans on candidates across the political spectrum, manipulation of voter registration rolls, persistent media censorship, and other authoritarian tactics all but quashed political pluralism and ensured the elections would not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people."
The NLG delegates said they "reject" the Biden administration's characterization of the elections in Venezuela, which is enduring an economic crisis exacerbated by U.S. sanctions.
NLG President Suzanne Adely, a member of the delegation, suggested Blinken's comments were motivated by justifying the administration's policies, which include maintaining sanctions imposed under former President Donald Trump and continuing to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country's "interim president."
"The U.S.'s consistently false narrative of elections in Venezuela is formulated to legitimize the continuation of U.S. sanctions, which are violations of international law and amount to economic warfare," said Adely. "The U.S. sanctions harm the Venezuelan people and aim to undermine and destabilize Venezuela in order to further U.S. interests in the region."
\u201cCODEPINK\u2019s Teri Mattson is in Venezuela as an election observer! As the Venezuelan people head to the polls today let\u2019s keep in mind that the best thing Americans can do is RESPECT Venezuela\u2019s sovereignty, and REJECT economic warfare like deadly sanctions.\u201d— CODEPINK (@CODEPINK) 1637508799
Sunday's elections were the first since 2017 in which main opposition parties participated. Voters elected not only governors but also 253 state legislators, 335 mayors, and 2,471 municipal councilors.
Writing Monday for Common Dreams, Leonardo Flores, a Latin American policy expert and campaigner with the anti-war group CodePink, outlined five reasons for the Venezuelan left's success over the weekend:
According to Flores, "These elections should put the Biden administration on notice that continuing to support the MUD, and in particular, the fiction of Guaido as 'interim president,' is a failed policy."