US strikes are blowing up more than just boats in LatAm

Latin American and European leaders convened in the coastal Caribbean city of Santa Marta, Colombia this weekend to discuss trade, energy and security, yet regional polarization over the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean overshadowed the regional agenda and significantly depressed turnout.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and other European and Latin American leaders were skipping the IV EU-CELAC Summit, a biannual gathering of heads of state that represents nearly a third of the world’s countries and a quarter of global GDP, over tensions between Washington and the host government of Gustavo Petro.

Officially, the leaders cited the “current European political agenda and the low participation of other heads of state and government.”

Petro — who the Trump administration has placed on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list after calling him an “illegal drug leader” without providing any evidence — said last month that Washington was exerting pressure on countries, particularly in the Caribbean, to skip the event, in what he called a “diplomatic boycott.”

EU Council President Antonio Costa and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas attended the summit in place of von der Leyen — who had previously confirmed her attendance in a meeting with Petro in Brussels last month — while the president of Spain and the prime ministers of Portugal and the Netherlands were among the 9 total heads of state and government present.

Despite a well-attended EU-CELAC Summit in Brussels in 2023 — in which von der Leyen said that the EU aspired to be “the partner of choice” for Latin America and the Caribbean — EU leaders’ more recent concerns about antagonizing the U.S. administration have seemingly outweighed their quest for strategic autonomy at a time when the bloc is seeking to deepen its relations beyond the U.S.

At the last summit, the EU, which trades over $400 billion annually with the region and is by far its largest investor, relaunched a strategic partnership with 33 countries of CELAC, or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, in part by announcing $45 billion in fresh financing through the Global Gateway Initiative.

More broadly, the EU has presented itself as a like-minded, reliable partner for Latin America and the Caribbean amid shifting geopolitics and great power competition in the hemisphere, and sees the region as a potential market for its industrial products and a stable supplier of renewable energy and critical minerals. The region possesses 60% of the world’s lithium and 40% of its copper, holds 60% of global renewable energy potential, and represents 14% of global food production and 45% of the global agri-food trade.

Seeing immense potential for growth, the EU is currently finalizing two major trade agreements with Mexico and MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia), a key litmus test for further biregional integration.

Yet Washington’s increasingly aggressive stance toward the Americas, including military threats against Venezuela and nearly two dozen airstrikes against alleged drug boats that Petro considers extrajudicial killings, has shifted the Europeans’ calculus, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

In the leadup to this weekend’s summit, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who attended alongside heads of state from Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, and St. Kitts and Nevis, said the meeting “would only make sense, at this moment, if it were to discuss the issue of U.S. warships in Latin American waters.”

To discuss that issue, Lula went so far as to temporarily leave his own summit, the COP30 U.N. climate conference in Belém, Brazil, which both von der Leyen and Macron attended last week. Despite skipping out on Santa Marta, Macron — who apparently had few qualms appearing alongside Petro — traveled from Brazil to Mexico City this weekend to meet with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who also did not attend the EU-CELAC Summit despite expressing criticism of the U.S. boat strikes.

Colombian Vice Foreign Minister Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir said last week that upcoming presidential elections in Chile and Honduras also made it difficult for those countries’ center-left presidents Gabriel Boric and Xiomara Castro, who have attended past CELAC summits, to join their peers in Santa Marta. Bolivia, which for 20 years under the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party was heavily involved in regional fora, inaugurated a new, center-right president Saturday, Rodrigo Paz, who also did not attend.

Founded in 2011 in Caracas as a counterweight to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), CELAC includes every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Canada.

The bloc has served as a vehicle to boost Latin American and Caribbean ties beyond the U.S., not only with the EU, but also with India, the African Union, the Arab world and China.

In May, shortly after taking over from Honduran President Xiomara Castro as the body’s president pro tempore, Petro traveled to Beijing with Brazil’s Lula, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, and dozens of foreign ministers to preside over the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the China-CELAC Forum alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Yet CELAC has been hobbled by the lack of a permanent secretariat, annual changes in the group’s leadership, piecemeal financing, non-binding decisions, and persistent internal divisions.

At the CELAC heads of state summit in Honduras last March, which featured a rare appearance by Mexico’s Sheinbaum, internal tensions over how to respond to the Trump administration’s migration, trade and security agenda led Argentina, Paraguay and Nicaragua to object to the body’s final declaration.

The downgraded EU-CELAC summit in Santa Marta this weekend came just a week after the Dominican Republic announced that next month's X Summit of the Americas, an arguably more significant regional meeting organized in close coordination with the U.S. State Department and the OAS, would be postponed due to the "unforeseeable, profound differences that make productive dialogues in the Americas difficult."

After the Dominican Republic decided last month that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua would not be invited to attend the Summit — just as President Biden did for the 2022 summit in Los Angeles — Petro and Sheinbaum said they would not attend in opposition to the exclusion of any country.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a number of Cuban-American Republican lawmakers immediately backed Santo Domingo’s announcement, which also cited the devastating impact of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean among its reasons for postponement.

The two diplomatic let-downs mark one of the lowest moments for regional relations in decades. Yet as the Trump administration makes its distaste for multilateralism abundantly clear, some countries in the region are taking the cue by prioritizing their bilateral ties to the U.S. over deeper integration with their neighbors.

Last week, Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa received Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to explore potential U.S. bases in the country. Argentine President Javier Milei made his fourteenth trip to the U.S. in under two years to speak alongside President Trump at a Miami business summit. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele allowed a U.S. attack aircraft to operate out of his capital’s international airport. And Trinidadian Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar let a U.S. warship dock at the country’s main port just seven miles off the Venezuelan coast.

Needless to say, none of these presidents bothered to travel to Santa Marta, and their representatives abstained from many clauses in the final declaration.