Alberto Fernández visits Ecuador and seeks Celac presidency

President Alberto Fernández will stop campaigning for a few days and will travel to Ecuador on Tuesday to meet his counterpart Guillermo Lasso, with whom he will finish rebuilding bilateral relations. With this visit, Fernández will ensure Ecuador’s support for his election as head of Celac at the summit to be held in Mexico City in the middle of next month. This will be another of the objectives of the trip since, from Ecuador, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Felipe Solá will continue his way to the Dominican Republic where he will meet some of the ministers of the region with the aim of removing the last obstacle to the arrival of Fernández at the head of the organization, after Nicaragua’s proposal for an alternative candidacy.

Former banker and representative of the Ecuadorian right, Lasso imitated in his first steps in foreign policy the ways of the Chilean Sebastián Piñera. In other words, a lot of pragmatism and a search for a good link also with progressive governments. Fernández has notoriously supported his opponent Andrés Aráuz, the candidate of Rafael Correa, in the Ecuadorian elections. Many mistakes made in the campaign led Aráuz to lose a ballot that seemed to have been won. But Lasso disregarded this precedent and sought to have an introductory meeting with the Argentine president when they agreed in Lima for the investiture of Pedro Castillo, where they agreed to visit. official which will take place this Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It’s been a lot more than productive even when many stop us on different paths,” Fernández said after that first conversation in Lima. “The truth is that the differences are not that many when it comes to seeing how we specify goals, and we have to achieve mutual respect in diversity and work together for what Latin America needs, c ‘that is, create a space where we can discuss our destiny, ”he added. The President will visit Tuesday at noon with a small entourage. In the evening he will have dinner with Lasso and the next day they will hold a bilateral meeting at the Palacio de Carondelet, seat of government. The return is scheduled for Thursday.

The Foreign Office hoped to leave behind any open suspicion in the relationship to focus on issues of affinity and avoid controversy. In principle, Lasso would not bring any complaints against the fact that a former minister of Correa, María de los Angeles Duarte, remains at the Argentine embassy in Quito, where she has been a refugee since last year, after being sentenced. to eight years in prison in a case of notebooks of corruption very similar to that which exists in the Argentinian legal system.

The Celac strategy

With this visit, Fernández will ensure Lasso’s support for his appointment as Celac’s pro tempore president for 2022 at the summit to be held in Mexico City on September 18, a few days after PASO. Oddly enough, Fernández has the sure vote of every right-wing government: Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia and now Ecuador. Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil has suspended its participation in the organization.

The problem comes from the left. The election of the presidency pro tempore is made by consensus. The problem that arose for Fernández’s appointment concerned the ALBA countries after Daniel Ortega’s anger over the decision of Argentina and Mexico to withdraw their ambassadors in Nicaragua. Ortega then proposed to Celac “Comrade Ralph” Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, an island in the Caribbean. Argentina trusts in the good offices that the Bolivian and Venezuelan foreign ministries can exercise to persuade Ortega to give up his idea.

To this end, Foreign Minister Solá and his chief of staff Guillermo Justo Chaves will travel from Quito to the Dominican Republic to participate in a summit of foreign ministers and hold some meetings.. They will meet the new Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Félix Plasencia, a discreet diplomat who could act to unblock the case.

In the tradition of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who holds the title of Celac until December 31, Alberto Fernández wants this continental body to take the place of the OAS, with the prestige of the underground thanks to the leadership of Luis Almagro. Mexico has already done so this year by contributing to initiatives of common interest such as, for example, supporting research into vaccines for all. Without much debate and without further activity, AMLO reactivated Celac and proposed it as a truly autonomous regional body, since it is not made up of the United States or Canada. On the other hand, there is the Cuba and Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro, both excluded from the OAS.

Hand in hand with a recovered Celac, AMLO and Fernández plan to give their mandates a bigger international role and, with them, the region. But in the two foreign ministries, they make it clear that they are neither seeking to replace the OAS nor to designate an anti-North American policy, but simply an organization that unites Latin America and faithfully represents its interests and its interests. concerns. “We see the United States as a very important ally in Argentina’s economic recovery,” Solá warned Thursday in an interview with the Council of the Americas, when he also defined himself as an “admirer” of Joe Biden in several of his proposals.