While Donald Trump’s absence has been haunting the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil this week, his shadow loomed over a meeting between the European Union and Latin American states in neighbouring Colombia. I’ll have more to say about Cop30 later this week but a few thoughts today on that other summit.
‘This is how diplomacy works’
When Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés visited the White House with other Latin American ministers in June 1969, he told Richard Nixon how impossible the power imbalance made it to deal with the United States. The following day, Henry Kissinger requested a private lunch with Valdés.
“You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South,” Kissinger told him.
“History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”
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Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and most other European leaders appeared to be sending a similar message by skipping this week’s summit between the European Union and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) in the Colombian city of Santa Marta. But the truth may be a little more complicated.
The most popular theory is that EU leaders wanted to avoid antagonising Donald Trump by attending a meeting hosted by Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro. Trump has accused Petro without evidence of enabling drug cartels and placed him and his family on a sanctions list.
The Colombian president has been among the loudest critics among regional leaders of Trump’s military build-up in the Caribbean and the US missile attacks on Venezuelan boats that have killed 76 people, all of them apparently civilians.
Trump justifies the military campaign, which is almost certainly in breach of international law, as an anti-drugs exercise but it appears to be aimed at forcing Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, out of office.
Maduro, who stole an election last year to secure a third term as president, has few friends in the region after presiding over an exodus of more than seven million of his citizens to neighbouring countries.
But Trump’s actions are seen across most of Latin America as a dangerous escalation in his aggressive interpretation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which sees the entire region as part of Washington’s sphere of influence.
Petro and Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hoped to use the Santa Marta summit to send a message of defiance towards Trump in defence of Venezuela’s sovereignty. But divisions and rivalries within Celac, a weak organisation at the best of times, saw most Latin American and Caribbean leaders following the European lead by avoiding the summit.
The meeting exceeded expectations by agreeing a joint statement that included a commitment to upholding international law and a reference to “the importance of maritime security and regional stability in the Caribbean”. Asked why the text did not mention the US since it was clearly meant as criticism of Washington, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told El País that doing so would have made it impossible for some countries to sign the statement.
“This is how diplomacy works,” she said.
The next item on the EU’s Latin American agenda is finalising a trade agreement with Mercosur, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. For leaders on both sides, it represents an act of resistance to Trump’s ambition to rewrite the rules of global trade and as a hedge against China which, unlike Kissinger, believes that what happens in the South is very important indeed.
Please let me know what you think and send me your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com
