Hours before the adviser, the president’s special adviser for the Americas, Christopher J. Dodd, was to visit Buenos Aires on Monday, the State Department released a statement with a suggestive message.

The text is terse, as these Washington documents tend to be. But it contains a strong message of what the Joe Biden administration wants to say to members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Noting that Dodd’s visit “reflects the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to working with our neighbors to promote inclusive economic growth, address common challenges, and advance democracy, human rights and rule of law in our hemisphere,” stresses, “In accordance with the Biden-Harris administration’s engagement with relevant regional mechanisms on these critical goals, the U.S. government. reaffirms the value of strengthening regional collaboration through the Organization of American States (which is the OAS), the principal multilateral forum in the Western Hemisphere. »

The Celac summit began this Tuesday 24 under the presidency pro tempore of Alberto Fernández, who will receive former senator Dodd. Ambassadors Jorge Argüello and Marc Stanley joined this visit. And he had as a moment of high tension, the failure of Nicolás Maduro, whose government was justified by the fact that, behind the complaints and protests against him, there was “a plan” to attack him from the ” neo-fascist right”. “

The State Department’s sentence is a strong U.S. position in the face of recent attempts to blow up the OAS, notably by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Alberto Fernández in the alliance they have put in place since 2019 and which is today weakened with the appearance on the regional and world scene of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Indeed, after having adjusted the speech with the Mexican president during the last Summit of the Americas – which this Tuesday Alberto F. inadvertently confused several times with that of CELAC – the Argentine president not only condemned the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but instead called for the dismissal of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

“I recall the urgency of rebuilding the OAS, if it wants to be respected, it must be restructured by immediately removing those who run it,” Fernández said before the plenary session that listened to him in Los Angeles last June.

However, at this CELAC summit, Fernández did not even invite Luis Almagro, who was Chancellor of Uruguay under the government of José Mujica. Fernández has a very bad relationship with him. He practically accuses him of complicity with Donald Trump in the abrupt departure of Evo Morales from power in Bolivia, described here as a coup. And other controversies have moved in the region.

The government never passes resolutions at the OAS condemning or putting pressure on Venezuela and occasionally against Nicaragua. Both are in the process of leaving the organization due to a disagreement with critics. Cuba was expelled by the United States in the 1960s under an old Cold War policy that it never wanted to see again.

CELAC was explicitly promoted by the late Hugo Chávez to the exclusion of the United States and Canada. But for this summit, Alberto F. has specially invited Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping; the President of the European Council, Charles Michell, the leaders of the African Union and invited Felix Plasencia, the executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, made up of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia .

For this reason, it seems more controversial that he didn’t invite Luis Almagro. In geopolitics, the OAS and CELAC are “parents”. Argentine diplomats assured that there was a consensus in the region not to invite him, but Clarín spoke with foreign sources and they assured that just like the host and president of the summit bears all the expenses of invitation -hotels and accommodation, which are in dollars- he decides who invites and uninvites.

Dodd, who does not want any contact with the press, will deliver his speech this afternoon at the summit. And he will hold different interviews, in addition to that of Fernandez