Uncle Sam just wants to make friends

The April 2015 Summit of the Americas should be Washington's big chance to make nice with Cuba. But the clumsy handling of Venezuela has made enemies.

Author

  • Christopher Sabatini

    Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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The first time President Barack Obama met the late President Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas six years ago, the voluble Venezuelan leader gave the recently elected American a bear hug. The public display of affection toward the U.S. president reflected the global embrace of an African-American U.S. president, and demonstrated that perhaps a new era had dawned after the rocky years of the Bush administration.

But when Obama meets Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, at this year’s summit on April 10 in Panama, there won’t be any hugging.

468693690_4-7That’s because on March 9 the White House issued an executive order that pulled the visas and froze the U.S.-based assets of seven Venezuelan officials implicated in human rights abuses against democratic activists over the past year. Unfortunately, the order to freeze their assets also included standard Treasury Department bureaucratese that branded Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

To read more visit: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/07/obama-maduro-castro-cuba-venezuela-summit/

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