Speaking at that event, in his position as president pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), Fernández questioned the US policy against the region and asked to repair the damage caused.
I regret that not all who should be present in this very conducive area for debate. (…) The silence of the absent challenges us. The fact of being the host country of the Summit does not grant the ability to impose the right of admission on the other members of the continent, he asserted.
In opposition to what happened in this event, the head of the Argentine State assured that CELAC is a space where diversity and respect prevail.
We have different views, but we share similar concerns in this complex present. We observe with pain the suffering suffered by sister nations. Cuba endures a blockade of more than six decades and Venezuela tolerates another, while the Covid-19 pandemic drags millions of lives with it, he said.
With measures of this type, they seek to condition governments, but in reality they only harm the people. We definitely would have wanted another Summit of the Americas. Dialogue in diversity is the best instrument to promote democracy and the fight against inequality, he added.
Likewise, he urged the US president, Joe Biden, to “open up in a fraternal way in order to favor common interests.”
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 have the right to bread, land, shelter and decent work, he said.
The years prior to his arrival in the United States government were marked by an immensely damaging policy for our region, deployed by the Donald Trump administration. It’s time for that to change and the damage to be repaired, he said.
On the other hand, he denounced “the use of the Organization of American States (OAS) as a gendarme that facilitated the coup in Bolivia (2019) and the appropriation of the leadership of the Inter-American Development Bank.”
In this sense, he described as urgent the need to rebuild the institutions that were designed to promote integration.
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 said.
In addition, he indicated that, during Trump’s mandate, the actions of rapprochement with Cuba initiated during the presidency of Barack Obama, in which Biden was deputy president, were disrupted.
That administration’s intervention with the International Monetary Fund was also decisive in facilitating unsustainable indebtedness in favor of an Argentine government in decline, he said.
The foregoing was done with the sole purpose of preventing the electoral triumph of the Frente de Todos. For such indecency suffers today all the Argentine people, he said.
Fernández criticized the exclusion of the logo from the Malvinas Islands Summit and reiterated the sovereign right of his nation over that territory, occupied by the United Kingdom.
Argentina is a peaceful country. We continue to claim our legitimate rights through diplomatic channels and we trust in dialogue. After the tragedy of the pandemic, we see wars as the triumph of human insensitivity. We must build together a renewed humanism, he asserted.
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