Alberto Fernández’s harsh speech at the Summit of the Americas

“I regret that not all of us who should have been present were able to be present, in this environment that is so conducive to debate. ” Already at the beginning of his speech at the plenary meeting of the Summit of the Americas, President Alberto Fernández spoke bluntly. He strongly criticized the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua –although without naming the latter country–, as well as the policy of blockades implemented historically. He mentioned the need for the countries of the region to implement a tax on unexpected income. He criticized “the unsustainable debt” that the IMF granted to the government of Mauricio Macri. And he denounced: ” The OAS has been used as a gendarme that facilitated a coup in Bolivia”, claiming that the organization be restructured, “completely removing those who lead it.”

He did it, as he also clarified in that introduction, in his capacity as president of CELAC. From that same representation, at the end of his strong and forceful message, he invited the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to participate in the next plenary meeting of Celac, which is planned in Buenos Aires, next December.

Thus, he took up the glove that Nicolás Maduro had thrown last Monday, by publicly making the same request.

“I look forward to your invitation,” Joe Biden replied when, at the end of the speech, he came over to greet him.

“I think we started strong,” the host president said later, as a way of decontracting the moment, in his closing remarks ( see separate note ). “Despite some disagreements related to participation, on the substantive issues what I heard was unity and uniformity,” he concluded.

“Beyond words, the relationship with the United States is excellent. A bilateral relationship will never be affected if its interlocutors speak clearly,” said Ambassador Jorge Argüello at the end of the speech, when asked about the impact of his words on the current geopolitical board. And he confirmed the holding of the bilateral meeting that the president will hold at the end of July with Biden in Washington, as agreed in the recent telephone conversation.

Alberto Fernández’s speech adopted a strong critical tone, which encompassed not only geopolitics but also issues related to internal politics such as unexpected income – at the local level, the government has just sent the bill tax to Congress, defined by the Minister of Economy as “a strict act of social justice”– and the complaint about the “unsustainable indebtedness” that the government of Mauricio Macri took.

Perhaps the eight minutes that the speech had as a limit – like that of all the leaders who participated, Biden in the opening, and then the presidents of Belize, Panama, and Paraguay – contributed to the fact that each idea was expressed forcefully. Even though the speech covered a number of topics, including the defense of human rights as a symbol of Argentine democracy and the claim of sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands.

“We definitely would have wanted another Summit of the Americas. The silence of those absent challenges us. So that this does not happen again, I would like to make it clear for the future that the fact of being the host country of the Summit does not grant the ability to impose a ‘ right of admission’ over the member countries of the continent,” Fernandez emphasized in a section of his speech.

“The central world has set obviously inequitable financial rules,” he also denounced. “From the periphery in which they place us, Latin America and the Caribbean look with pain at the suffering suffered by brother peoples.”

In this section, he recalled that ” Cuba supports a blockade of more than six decades imposed in the years of the Cold War and Venezuela tolerates another one, while a pandemic that devastates humanity drags millions of lives with it.” “With measures of this type, they seek to condition governments, but in fact, they only harm the people,” he concluded.

In addition to denouncing the role of the OAS in Bolivia, he specifically criticized, addressing Biden: “They have appropriated the leadership of the Inter-American Development Bank, which was historically in Latin American hands. The actions of rapprochement with Cuba, in which Pope Francisco mediated, that they had meant advances made by the administration of Barack Obama, while you were vice president.”

“The OAS, if it wants to be respected and return to being the regional political platform for which it was created, must be restructured by immediately removing those who lead it,” he claimed. “The Regional Development Bank, without further delay, has to return its governance to Latin America and the Caribbean. The IDB requires a capitalization process to have more and better means of financing,” he also requested.

Debt and unexpected rent

“The intervention of the Donald Trump government before the International Monetary Fund was decisive in facilitating unsustainable indebtedness in favor of an Argentine government in decline. It did so with the sole purpose of preventing what ended up being the electoral victory of our political force. The entire Argentine people suffer today for such indecency,” he also denounced. Although at this point the questioning pointed to the responsibility of the Argentine government that took on the debt, the co-responsibility of the organization that granted the loan remained floating, implicit, in the enunciation.

In the last section of the speech, he introduced the subject of unexpected rent. “Faced with so much inequality, we must raise the need for progressive tax policies, even when the domestic elites present us as a danger to democratic quality,” he assessed, highlighting how broad and diverse the concept of “democracy” can be, as seen at this summit. ” The windfall income that the war gave as a gift to large food, oil, and arms corporations should be taxed to improve income distribution,” he said.

Climate change, Malvinas, Human Rights

On climate change, an issue that crosses one of the axes of this summit, he spoke in terms of “environmental injustice”: “We are environmental creditors”, he defined Latin America and the Caribbean. “We provide oxygen to the planet and we are not responsible for emitting the gases that cause the greenhouse effect,” she located.

At the end, he made it clear that “we continue to claim through diplomatic channels the legitimate rights that we have over our Malvinas Islands.” And he defined: “I come from a humanist country where we enshrine the value of human rights as the heart of our identity and we will always defend its validity in all areas.”

It was at that moment that Alberto Fernández stopped his speech, turned around, and pointed out the geographical omission of the logo of the Summit of the Americas: the Malvinas Islands were not included in the map that symbolizes the American continent.

For the closing, he chose to quote Perón’s phrase: United or dominated. ” United by the ‘common home’ or dominated by economic greed. United by multilateralism or dominated by polarization. United by democracy with social inclusion or dominated by individualism and collective misery”, was the new call of the hour.

I’m here trying to build bridges and tear down walls. As president of CELAC, I would like to invite you to participate in our next plenary meeting. I dream that in a fraternally united America, we commit ourselves so that all human beings who inhabit our continent have the right to bread, land, a roof over their heads, and a decent job.

– President Biden