BUENOS AIRES — President Trump is invited but was coy for a time about whether he’d accept. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro isn’t invited but vows to crash the party anyway. And Peruvian President Pablo Kuczynski is dealing with a second impeachment fight in less than a year as he prepares to host the leaders of North and South America.
One month before the two-day eighth Summit of the Americas kicks off in Lima on April 13, the gathering is not shaping up as an advertisement for hemispheric harmony.
The signs were already ominous when Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson suggested last month that it was too early to confirm Mr. Trump’s attendance at the summit amid deteriorating U.S. ties with Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba.
While the White House did confirm Saturday that Mr. Trump will attend the Lima summit and then travel to Colombia to meet with President Juan Manuel Santos, there has been much talk about a possible cool reception from many fellow leaders and an uncertain welcome from the host city.
But sending the diplomatic temperature soaring has been the announcement by embattled Venezuelan socialist President Nicolas Maduro that he was coming, even though he had pointedly not been issued an invitation. Caracas’ relations with the U.S. and a number of Latin American states has plummeted as he cracked down on political dissent and sparked a refugee crisis with his mishandling of the country’s devastated economy.
“Do you fear me? You don’t want to see me in Lima? You’re going to see me. Because come rain or shine, by air, land or sea, I will attend the Summit of the Americas,” Mr. Maduro told reporters in Caracas.
Days later, he said that if Mr. Trump does make the trip, “we will understand each other, communicate with each other and respect each other.”
That might cause fireworks. According to the White House, when Mr. Trump confirmed on the phone with Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski that he would be there, part of their talk was about restoring democracy in Venezuela.
Throw in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration from Central Americans, the cloudy future of the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S.-Cuba tensions and a Brazilian bribery scandal that has ensnared Mr. Kuczynski and other political leaders across the Southern Hemisphere, and the summit faces a daunting diplomatic hurdle.
If summit interventions by Mr. Maduro and his anti-U.S. populist mentor, the late Hugo Chavez, are any indication, his travel plans must have sent protocol officials scrambling.
At a 2007 Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile, the volatile Chavez dubbed former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a fascist, leading King Juan Carlos to tell him to “shut up” before rolling cameras. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad two years later, Chavez accosted President Obama with a 1973 book on anti-imperialism, which promptly turned into an Amazon best-seller.
Even the summit-crashing strategy is not untested. Delcy Rodriguez, then Mr. Maduro’s foreign minister, showed up uninvited for a Mercosur trade bloc summit in late 2016 and, as she tried to force herself into Buenos Aires’ San Martin Palace, ended up getting into a scuffle with local security personnel. Face-to-face, her Argentine counterpart said point-blank that she was not welcome.
The prospect of Mr. Maduro’s trip has given this year’s summit some unlikely prominence, which may at least help organizers battle the perception that the hemispheric gatherings are costly, impractical and increasingly meaningless wastes of time. The main problem, though, is that on substance, regional leaders have found little common ground in recent months — and thus little chance of productive talks, analysts say.
Peru’s decision to disinvite Mr. Maduro — citing his decision to move up national elections in what critics say was a bid to undercut Venezuela’s opposition forces — already has proved divisive, with leftist governments in Cuba, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia protesting the move.
Blaming the U.S., Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Twitter: “We reject that a minority of countries directed by Trump’s interventionist obsession wants to turn the Summit of the Americas into a coup instrument against Venezuela. Attacking a president democratically elected is attacking the people who elected him.”
Antigua and Barbuda last week voiced its support for Venezuela’s participation as well, saying Peru’s move could set a bad precedent.
“If this is allowed to occur, then any member state of the OAS could be excluded from a summit meeting or a general assembly meeting at the sole behest of the host country.”
The original impetus for the summit — a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which the Clinton administration proposed during its first installment in 1994 in Miami — died 11 years later when leftist leaders rallied by Chavez shot it down at the fourth summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Mr. Obama, insisting that “multilateralism regulates hubris,” attended the three following summits of the Americas in 2009, 2012 and 2015.
Mr. Trump, however, has made clear that he has little appetite for new multilateral trade agreements and favors bilateral channels over travel-intensive summit diplomacy.
“Historically, [the United States] was the backbone that made the regional multilateral system function in political terms, in economic terms,” said Gustavo Cardozo of the Argentine Center of International Studies in Buenos Aires. Today, “what is perceived is that the United States is somewhat looking inward, shutting itself off, and doesn’t much want to work with Latin America.”
That’s not to say, though, that the summit quandary is merely an issue with Washington on one side and its Latin American neighbors on the other; rather, a common vision is hard to come by even among Central and South Americans, Mr. Cardozo said.
“Latin America is responsible for all the bad decisions it took during the years of populism in the region,” he said. “Today, we see a very, very fragmented agenda — too fragmented of an agenda — with totally diverse interests. … It’s not just in terms of Venezuela. We have a political crisis in Brazil, an internal crisis within the [trade bloc] Mercosur … and [countries lining] the Pacific are in their own world.”
With Caracas’ neighbors concerned about the influx of Venezuelan refugees and a potentially chaotic total meltdown of the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan leader’s antics may end up contributing the sole unifying factor. So even some of his sharpest critics, it turns out, want Mr. Maduro in Lima.
“I believe it was a mistake to disinvite him,” said Maria Teresa Belandria Exposito, a professor of international law at the Central University of Venezuela, noting that the top-level talks could be an opportunity “to make him understand how much he is despised, publicly. The presidents would have him sitting there where he couldn’t just get up and walk away.”
Beyond such symbolism, Ms. Belandria said, the summits have quietly produced important results that ultimately may help restore democratic norms in her country.
“Why do I believe the summit’s mechanisms can be effective? Because it was precisely at the Summit of the Americas that the idea for a treaty like the Inter-American Democratic Charter came about,” she said.
That document, adopted by the Organization of American States in 2001, spells out the consequences governments face in case of an “unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order.”
Attempts to use the charter to rein in the Maduro regime, though, have failed. The absence of Cuba — which participated in the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama City but, critics say, has no interest in signing the charter to continue to do so — further underscores doubts over just how consequential the Lima summit will be.
“It’s a problem because, in truth, Venezuela is something that affects the region a lot,” Mr. Cardozo said. “But the necessary decisions are not being taken, not just in terms of more forcefully restraining Nicolas Maduro’s regime … but also in terms of an external actor like Cuba.”
A more tightly integrated inter-American system, thus, might be what is ultimately needed to restore usefulness of the Summit of the Americas, said Ben Raderstorf of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank.
“The summits are sort of this separate side process that are partially owned by the OAS and partially owned by the host governments and other organizations like the [Inter-American Development Bank],” said the co-author of a recent reform proposal for the regional body. “That is both a problem for the summits and a problem for the OAS.”
Rethinking the entire hemispheric system, thus, might be a valuable agenda item, Mr. Raderstorf said.
Summits are “a great place to get together and sort of talk and pursue more informal face-to-face presidential diplomacy but [don’t] integrate as well,” he said. “If the Summit of the Americas was the formal governing body of the OAS, then maybe it would improve things on both sides.”
First, though, all eyes will be on who shows up for the latest presidential get-together. Although Peruvian Prime Minister Mercedes Araoz is still counting on Air Force One making its way into Lima, she also seems unlikely to budge on Mr. Maduro.
“He cannot even enter Peruvian airspace,” Ms. Araoz said last month. “He has to understand that we don’t want to receive him in Peru.”
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