Americas summit marks region's historic changes

Corruption scandals taint the presidencies of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Chile is squabbling with Bolivia. Venezuela is in a protracted state of crisis, while its border with Colombia is rife with smugglers plying a lucrative trade in contraband gasoline. Central America is the most murderous place on earth, thanks to drug-trafficking. The dispute over the Keystone XL pipeline has chilled Canada's relations with the US, while the Caribbean remains a collection of financially precarious states. These are only some of the neighbourly problems that the hemisphere's leaders take to Panama this week for the Summit of the Americas. It also makes the meeting's theme, "the challenges of American co-operation", doubly ironic. Indeed, it has already been agreed that nobody will agree, and therefore there will be no final communique - an interesting take on mutual support.

Nonetheless, this year's meeting, a once-every-four-years gathering, is genuinely historic. It will be the first time since the days of Dwight Eisenhower that the US and Cuban presidents will formally meet. Their double billing, at Latin America's insistence, accompanies moves begun by the US and Cuba to re-establish diplomatic relations. The prospect of rapprochement, and an end to the US trade embargo, has weakened the summit's usual anti-Yankee animus - one of the few things Latin Americans agree on.

More importantly, the summit coincides with a significant change in the world economy. For the first time in a decade, the forces shaping global capitalism are in the US's favour rather than in South America's. The commodity "supercycle" is ebbing as China's economy slows, and what had seemed to be an elixir guaranteeing endless growth has proved a chimera. Even well-managed economies, such as Chile's and Colombia's, have slowed sharply. Spendthrifts such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela have meanwhile suffered more as the mismanagement masked by the commodity boom has been exposed.

This economic shift will have powerful political effects, too. It should deflate some of the region's loudest anti-US voices, particularly the Venezuela-led Alba bloc of leftwing countries. It could also mark a reconsideration of US relations among the rest. Much recent Latin American diplomacy has focused on Beijing. It may be a sign of the times that Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's embattled president, has said she wants to resume the US state visit that she cancelled two years ago due to US electronic snooping on her emails.

By and large, the Americas today enjoy resilient political democracies with reasonably well-managed economies, and thriving commercial links. Sadly, Venezuela is an exception. Worse, attempts by its Latin American peers to hold Caracas to their own democratic standards have been meek at best, and more often non-existent. This pathetic spectacle has sapped arguments for the larger world role that Latin America often claims.

US diplomacy, though, has done little better. On March 9, under the legal rubric that it faced an "extraordinary threat to . . . national security", Washington slapped sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials it deemed guilty of human rights abuses. Such unfortunate language gave Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president, a sympathy bump across the region.

This is doubly absurd. Venezuela is a national security threat only to itself. And if Washington can only sanction foreign officials by declaring a whole country is a threat, then those legal requirements should be changed. Everywhere, the best way to improve co-operation is to begin at home.

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