Letter from Correa to Santos

Rafael Correa

08/04/2012

Opinión

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Letter from Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos

(Unofficial English translation by Sean Joseph Clancy and Jane Franklin)

Quito, 2 April 2012

Doctor Juan Manuel Santos

Constitutional President of the Republic of Colombia

Bogota

Dear President and Friend,

I deeply appreciate and value your graceful and forthright invitation to attend the 6th Summit of the Americas which is to be held in beautiful Cartagena de Indias on the 14th and 15th of April. Regretfully, and in spite of the fact that at the 5th Summit which took place in Trinidad and Tobago from the 17th to the 19th of April 2009 the incomprehensible exclusion of the Republic of Cuba from the Summit of the Americas was rejected, once again this fellow nation has not been invited to attend.

By definition a meeting that intentionally and unjustly excludes one American country cannot be called a "Summit of the Americas". There has been mention of a failure to reach a consensus, but we all know that we are dealing with a veto by hegemonic countries, an intolerable situation for our America in the 21st century.

It is equally intolerable that these summits should fail to address such fundamental issues as the inhuman blockade of Cuba and the aberrant colonization of the Malvinas Islands, which have earned the almost unanimous rejection of all the nations of the world.

We would never seek to cause even the slightest problem to either your government or our beloved Colombia. We are attempting, as Bolivar said, to truly sense that our Homeland is America and to in some way begin to forcefully confront and denounce these repeated, intolerable and aberrant situations. For this reason, having given the matter due consideration, I have decided that for as long as I am President of the Republic of Ecuador that I will not attend a Summit of the “Americas” until the decisions that our Great Homeland [la Patria Grande] demands of us are taken.

Our peoples might well tire of their representatives attending so many summits while there are still many abysmal problems to overcome, such as the poverty and inequality that keep Latin America the most inequitable region of the world; our ineffective strategy for combating the global problem of drugs; the profound transformation of the Inter-American Human Rights System, today the guardian of interests alien to its founding principles; the validation of a true freedom of expression not diluted by the interests of social communication businesses; or the absolute domination of humanity by capital illustrated by the mortgage crisis in Spain which affects hundreds of thousands of people many of whom are Latin-American immigrants.

We would like our absence to be a cordial invitation to debate the essential and to act as a result, reaffirming the appreciation and respect we feel for our colleagues, the Continent’s Heads of State, dear friends with whom we share the dream of better days for our peoples.

We desire, for the good of the region and the world, that the Cartagena Summit be a success. The desire to attend is enormous, only outweighed by the firmness of our convictions.

Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Rafael Correa Delgado

Constitutional President of the Republic of Ecuador

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