(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Catástrofe total en la Cumbre UE-CELAC)
The summit of the EU and CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) held at the beginning of the week ended just as it deserved, that is, in a terrible fiasco, in a disgrace for the EU and a display of totalitarian shamelessness on the part of the representatives of some Ibero-American dictatorships.
It was foreseeable, as all the prior warnings reveal, that a meeting in Brussels to study new forms of cooperation and engagement should not have included countries under regimes that massively violate human rights, do not recognize rights for their peoples, are governed lawlessly under the absolute arbitrariness of their dictators and repressive apparatuses, and are involved in serious international crime activities such as drug trafficking. Because they do not meet the minimum conditions for that general framework of cooperation, and because it is an affront to all the democratic countries at the summit, both European and American.
But the organizers of the event, headed by the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, refused even to consider leaving the worst dictatorships out of a serious conversation, and so it happened that the serious transatlantic conversation became impossible. One may suspect that some will not regret it, because from the outset they only wanted to hold this meeting to whitewash the most ferocious dictatorships and the regimes that have set out on the path of narco-communist power and will foreseeably be similar dictatorships soon, unless some resistance or currently imponderable factor arises.
The summit was filled with images created precisely for that whitewashing of the criminal regimes, and there posed proudly Ursula von der Leyen and Pedro Sánchez with the dictator Díaz-Canel, who holds thousands of innocent Cubans under torture and has minors buried in dungeons, losing their physical and mental health, minors with prison sentences of five years for shouting freedom.
Many wondered how one was going to talk about development projects when Maduro, who did not dare come to Europe for fear of being arrested, sends as head of the delegation the internationally sanctioned drug trafficker and criminal Delcy Rodríguez. And even the multiple murderer and monstrous dictator Daniel Ortega sent a delegation that took the liberty of humiliating the European Union by imposing an amendment on a text that was already wretched in itself for its tepidness in assessing the war in Ukraine and the invasion and aggression by Russia.
The summit has therefore been a catastrophe for the credibility and the already much-battered reputation, not only of this disastrous current European Commission, but of the European Union in general. In two days it incinerated and threw overboard even the appearances of its principles and values in order to seek common denominators with criminal dictatorships allied precisely with Russia and China, most of them hostile when not saboteurs of the fight for the freedom of the sovereign countries of Central Europe, with Ukraine as the greatest exponent.
French President Emmanuel Macron had his photograph taken with genuine thugs; gangs of Spanish communists staged parallel totalitarian events with all the terrorist and drug-trafficking forces of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group around Brussels. Criminals who have the opposition imprisoned, such as Bolivia’s own Luis Arce, posed for photos next to framed images of dead founding fathers or living politicians. All of that will help him to tell his people to lose all hope, that Europe supports all the criminals and narco-communists who crush their peoples.
There were delirious situations in which the hitmen of these dictators blocked the passage to events of accredited staff members of the parliament in the very seat of the European Parliament. And members of the Cuban democratic resistance were assaulted by shadowy figures who had come from all the various dark warrens of Castroist and São Paulo-Forum communism on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the end, probably the only lasting effects of the EU-CELAC summit, beyond the shame and the colossal political and moral failure, and totally unrelated to any projects and agreements on commercial, industrial, social or scientific cooperation, of which not even a glimpse was seen, will be the internal European investigation that the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), of which VOX is a member and in which I chair the ECR-EuroLat Ibero-American Political Action Group, will certainly demand in the European Parliament.
Responsibilities will have to be established and explanations given of how it could happen that the seats of the institutions of the largest community of democratic nations in the world were stormed and hijacked by the henchmen of criminal regimes whose only reason for being is the crushing of their gagged peoples and their international criminal activities.
The EU-CELAC summit has therefore been a searing disgrace for the 27 countries of the EU that were paying for the party and for the organizers, whose chief person responsible, Josep Borrell, added another reason to resign or be dismissed. No one has any hope that he will find a shred of self-respect to leave the post, so he will exhaust his disastrous stint in office when this European Parliament is dissolved before the June 2024 elections.
What was meant to be presented as a stellar act right at the start of the Spanish presidency of the EU this semester, a great event of reunion after the pandemic to study and project new ways of cooperation between Europe and Ibero-America, turned into a shameful takeover of the EU’s seats in Brussels, including the European Parliament, by dictators, their henchmen and an army of communist hitmen and thugs who took advantage of the stage and the occasion to make propaganda for the narco-communist tyrannies and mockery of their victims.
But above all it has been a display of the criminal complicity that this European Commission practices with the worst dictatorships of Ibero-America. The credibility of the European Union has been left in tatters. And that is no longer fixed merely with the necessary disappearance of the sinister and disastrous Josep Borrell and his socialist team of collaboration with the São Paulo Forum.
From next June onward, a great work of reform will have to be undertaken in the European Parliament to put an end to the network of complicities between the Commission and Parliament on one side and, on the other, the totalitarian organizations of the narco-communism of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group. Perhaps that way it will also be possible to clarify conduct that is hard to explain today and that so greatly facilitated this political, diplomatic and moral catastrophe that the EU-CELAC summit has been.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
