CNN reports: “Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday he won’t be attending the Summit of the Americas, hosted later on this week by the United States, due to the exclusion of several countries in the region. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited to the summit because of the ‘lack of democratic space and the human rights situations’ in the countries, a senior Biden administration official said in a statement to CNN on Monday.” [See Friday IPA news release: “Biden Trip to Saudi Arabia: ‘Blatant Hypocrisy.’“]

GUILLAUME LONG, via Dan Beeton, beeton@cepr.net, (202) 239-1460, @ceprdc
    Long is senior policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. He recently wrote the piece “Joe Biden Has Botched the Summit of the Americas” for Jacobin.

He said today: “The Latin American challenge to U.S. hegemony in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century may not represent a mere distant relic of the past. The conservative cycle that has dominated Latin America over the last seven or so years appears to be ebbing, even before Lula’s likely presidential comeback in Brazil. Beyond the issue of who attends the Summit of the Americas and who doesn’t, the Biden administration may find that Latin America’s latest realignment with the United States is already on the wane.”

Long noted in his recent piece: “Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has led the charge, repeatedly saying, both in Mexico and during his recent visit to Cuba, that he will not attend the summit if certain countries are excluded. …

“The Argentine presidency of the CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which includes all the countries in the hemisphere except for the United States and Canada) has also called on the U.S. government to not exclude any country.”