U.S. can’t claim to care about Latin America when it has so few ambassadors there | Opinion

The Biden administration says it will host the June 6 Summit of the Americas to revamp U.S. ties with Latin America and the Caribbean.

That’s great, but the fact that Washington still has no U.S. ambassadors in eight countries in the Western Hemisphere raises serious questions about America’s commitment to the region.

There are no U.S. ambassadors in Brazil, Chile, Panama, Uruguay, El Salvador and Haiti, or in the hostile regimes of Cuba and Bolivia, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Some of these countries, such as Chile, have not had a U.S. ambassador in four years.

In addition, our ambassadors to Colombia and Ecuador have been reassigned or are scheduled to leave their jobs in coming months. It’s unclear when their successors will take over.

What’s even more critical now, there is no U.S. Ambassador to the 34-country Organization of American States, which is the group that organizes and helps set the agenda for the Summit of the Americas.

These summits, which are the only ones attended by heads of state from throughout the Western Hemisphere, have taken place every three or four years since the first one was held in Miami in 1994.

They are a rare opportunity for U.S. presidents to focus their attention on Latin America and, since established, have been attended by every U.S. president except Donald Trump. He showed little interest in inter-American relations and skipped the 2018 summit. The June summit in Los Angeles will be the second one held in the United States.

President Joe Biden’s proposed ambassador to the OAS, Frank Mora, a Florida International University professor and former U.S. Defense Department official, was nominated in August 2021, but his nomination remains blocked in the Senate.

The failure to expedite ambassadorial confirmations in Latin America and other parts of the world is mostly caused by political infighting between Senate Republicans and Democrats, bureaucratic hurdles and White House delays in the nominating process.

Diplomats agree that ambassadors are essential to advocate for U.S. interests, because they have much more clout than interim ambassadors or charge d’affaires. Ambassadors are taken much more seriously than their underlings by host country governments, they say.

“Having been both ambassador and charge d’affaires, I can tell you that there is a big difference,” John D. Feeley, former U.S. ambassador to Panama, told me. “A U.S. ambassador is the president’s official representative — everybody takes your calls much faster.”

While so many U.S. ambassadorial positions in Latin America remain vacant, Chinese ambassadors are increasingly visible in the region. It’s no longer rare to see big interviews with Chinese ambassadors in major Latin American newspapers.

Eric Farnsworth, head of the Washington, D.C., office of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas think tank, says not having ambassadors in so many countries sends “a terrible message” to the region.

“It sends a message that the Western Hemisphere is a low priority for the United States, just at a time when the U.S. is seeking allies to address difficult issues, such as migration, Venezuela or the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” he told me.

Farnsworth added, “You can make the case that not having an ambassador in Brazil, for instance, has made it more difficult for the United States to convince Brazil to take a stronger position against Russia.”

Indeed, the same can be said about the need for U.S. ambassadors to help organize the upcoming Summit of the Americas. With only nine weeks to go, senior officials in the region tell me that they have not been consulted, and that they are still in the dark about the meeting’s agenda.

It’s not even clear which countries will be invited. (Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott are shamefully trying to score political points at home by demanding that the dictators of Cuba and Venezuela not be invited, when such invitations were never in the cards.)

Time is running out, but President Biden could still take advantage of the summit’s rare opportunity to advance America’s interests — whether it’s on migration, trade, Venezuela or Russia’s war in Ukraine — by pushing harder to get U.S. ambassadors in place in Latin America.

The Biden administration understandably is focused on the war in Ukraine. That’s precisely why, now more than ever, it needs U.S. ambassadors to interact with Latin American governments every day — and get their calls returned.

This story was originally published April 27, 2022 at 2:14 PM.