Roger Harris for Counterpunch — Summit of the Americas Flops While Workers Summit Exposes Cracks in the Imperial Façade

Valentín, the man next to us in line as we made our way across the international border, asked what we had been doing in Tijuana. We had been at the Workers Summit of the Americas, organized as an alternative to Biden’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Our summit was as a place where countries besieged by and barred from the US could participate and was held in cooperation with a kindred counter-summit in Los Angeles.

Valentín, who had been born in Mexico and spent most of his working life in the United States, had seen the border from both perspectives. He commented about Biden’s summit that although the US is rich in resources, industry …

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Rosa Miriam Elizalde for La Jornada via Globetrotter — Storms At The Summit Of The Americas

June 7 was a bad day for Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS). During the ninth Summit of the Americas, a young man declared to him what he is: an assassin and puppet of the White House, instigator of the coup in Bolivia. He said that Almagro cannot come to give lessons on democracy when his hands are stained with blood. In another room at the summit in Los Angeles, Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to be doing no better: several journalists rebuked him for using freedom of the press to provide cover for the murderers of journalists and for…

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VIDEO: Democracy Now Interviews two experts on the official Summit, Biden Administration actions and the response of Latin American leaders. — Watch Video —

Top leaders from Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are all absent from the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced he would boycott the conference after the U.S. said it would not invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We speak with historian Alejandro Velasco and Roberto Lovato, award-winning Salvadoran American journalist and author, who calls the conference ​​”a failure of hemispheric proportions and a global embarrassment for the United States and for the Biden administration.” Lovato calls the Biden administration’s condemnation of some countries as anti-democratic hypocritical and says the absence of so many Latin American countries represents a decline in U.S. hegemony.

VIDEO: BreakThrough News reports on the Biden Administration’s exclusion of Cuba from the Summit of the Americas, as well as blockage of visas for Cuban special guests to the People’s Summit of Democracy.
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Biden excluded Cuba from the Summit of the Americas, and then the U.S. government blocked visas for Cuban special guests to the People’s Summit of Democracy as well. To discuss the U.S. policy of exclusion and the double standards in U.S. definitions of “democracy,” Brian is joined at the People’s Summit for Democracy by Gail Walker, executive director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization and Pastors for Peace.