© Reuters. PHOTO PHOTO: US President Joe Biden Speaks at North America’s Building Trades Union (NABTU) Legislative Conference in Washington, USA, April 6, 2022. REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque
By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will seek regional consensus on a new economic agenda to build on existing trade agreements with Latin America and present a plan to tackle rising migration when he hosts the US summit, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday .
Previewing Biden’s priorities for the negotiations in Los Angeles next week, administration officials said his message would be that “we can not do business as usual” in the hemisphere. But they offered few details on how he would tackle the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Summit preparations have been clouded by the threat of an embarrassing boycott by some regional leaders, including Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, if Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are excluded.
Washington hopes Lopez Obrador will attend, but is convinced that his absence will not diminish efforts to address migration or harm cooperation at the U.S. southern border, an official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The summit is being convened in the United States for the first time since the first such meeting in Miami in 1994, as Biden seeks to reaffirm US leadership and counter China’s growing influence. He and other executives are due to arrive in Los Angeles on June 8.
The United States has said it only wanted leaders of governments that respect democracy to attend, and last month said the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua had not been invited. The summit coordinator said last week that it would be up to the White House to decide whether Cuba should be invited.
One of Biden’s most important summit goals will be to help the region recover from the economic blow that the pandemic has suffered.
“We will use the summit to bring regional leaders, the private sector and civil society in line with a new and ambitious economic agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean, which I believe seems to build on the existing free trade agreements we have in the West. hemisphere, “said an official.
Asked if the summit could produce a proposal for a regional trade initiative similar to the framework of a 13-country US-Asian economic bloc announced by Biden on his Asia tour, the official said: “I would not make any comparisons.”
The bid’s approach will be to try to take advantage of trade agreements that are already in place, the official said. These could include the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement and bilateral pacts with various Latin American countries. Efforts to create a hemisphere-wide trading zone have never begun.
As Biden faces increasing domestic pressure over the record number of migrants trying to enter the United States at the Mexican border, he is expected to use the summit to seek help to stem the flow of people north.
The summit will produce a “statement” on irregular migration, including a package of messages, according to another official. “It will be non-binding, but it will be very forward-looking,” the official said, coming in with few details.
