The president of UruguayLuis Lacalle Pou announced that he will not attend the Summit of the Americas after testing positive for COVID-19.
“Due to the trip tomorrow to the Summit of the Americas in the US, I underwent a PCR today. The result showed that I am positive for COVID 19. As a result of this situation, I must cancel all activities for the next few days,”wrote Lacalle Pou on his official Twitter account.
For totally different reasons, the Uruguayan president joins the group of heads of government who will not attend the continental event.
The IX Summit of the Americas, scheduled to take place this week in the city of Los Angeles, California, has been mired in controversy, after the Mexican presidentAndrés Manuel López Obrador promoted a boycott of the event, if in the end the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited.
As anticipated last SundayBloomberg News and later confirmed the agencyReuters, and after weeks of intense deliberations,Joe Biden's Government made the final decision to exclude these governments from the Summit.
“US officials determined that concerns about human rights and the lack of democracy in the three countries, Washington's main antagonists in Latin America, weighed too much,” a Washington-based source told the aforementioned agency.
The Mexican president, for his part, has kept his promise and announced this Monday that he will not attend the meeting.
“I am not going to the summit because not all the countries of America are invited and I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries, exclusion, wanting to dominate for no reason, not respecting sovereignty of the countries,” AMLO said in his morning press conference this Monday, in which he specified that he will send Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard as a representative.
The Uruguayan president enjoys notoriety among Cubans after, in September of last year, during the VI Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), he exasperated the Cuban rulerMiguel Diaz-Canel, in whose presence he quoted fragments of the song “Patria y vida”, which has become an anthem of resistance and against repression for those who oppose the island's regime.
Lacalle said, during the high-level meeting in the Mexican capital, that it was a “very beautiful” song and “those who sing it feel oppressed by the government.”
The president of the South American country also condemned, in his speech, the lack of freedoms on the part of the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“When one sees that, in certain countries, there is not a full democracy, when the separation of powers is not respected, when the repressive apparatus is used by those in power to silence protests, when opponents are imprisoned, when Human Rights are not respected Humans, we, in this calm but firm voice, must say with concern that we seriously see what is happening in Cuba, in Nicaragua and in Venezuela,” Lacalle Pou warned then.
One day after his speech, a group of Cubans living in Uruguay demonstrated in Montevideo tothank the president for his solidarity.
The protesters, mainly members of the organizations Free Cubans in Uruguay and the Uruguayan Committee for Democracy in Cuba, gathered in the Plaza de la Independencia and chanted slogans for the freedom of the island, as well as expressions of gratitude to Lacalle Pou for his support.
Previously, the Uruguayan president alreadyhe had made his position clear regarding the human rights violations of the Havana regime.
In July of last year, he had said that "he who does not want to see it will have very strong ideological affinities, because no one has any doubt that Cuba is a dictatorship."
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