EU leaders have failed to persuade all of their Latin America and Caribbean counterparts to strongly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite watering down a joint statement closing a two-day summit in Brussels.
Ralph Gonsalves, the president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), brushed off a row after Nicaragua failed to agree to the sole paragraph on the war in the final 41-paragraph communique.
“Clearly we have concerns,” Gonsalves said. “The concern for us with Ukraine, among other things, would be the terrible suffering that is taking place among peoples who are directly involved in the conflict but also because of increasing prices, shortages of commodities, increasing immiseration of people.”
But he said stiff language was not always the strongest point in diplomacy. “It doesn’t mean that you have to go into the lambada in the nude,” he said.
The summit, the first of its kind in eight years, was designed to reboot relations between the EU and Latin America as the bloc seeks to wean itself off reliance on Russia and China for energy and critical raw materials.
The wrangling threatened to overshadow the summit but in the end Gonsalves declared it a success, saying it had brought the two regions together and there was a promise of another summit in two years in Colombia.
The EU announced it was committing more than €45bn to support the reinforced partnership between the two blocs.
As part of a wider package announced at the summit, the EU has agreed a memorandum of understanding with Chile establishing production of a new critical raw materials supply chain.
Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, joked it had taken five centuries for the relationship between Europe and Latin America to not be about the extraction of resources.
Gonsalves said the summit had given “life, direction and meaning” to a new relationship between the two regions and he would be holding the EU’s feet to the fire in relation to climate emergency funds.
Gonsalves had fought for stronger wording on reparations for slavery, including a reference to “native genocide”. But he said he had to accept that not everybody in the EU was a colonial power and the summit may not have been the correct forum for such a topic.
He instead compromised on text that expressed profound regret for the “untold suffering inflicted on millions of men, women and children as a result of the transatlantic slave trade”.
