President Joe Biden appointed former legislators Christopher Dodd and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, linked to Latin America, as advisers for the Summit of the Americas, which will bring together leaders of the region in Los Angeles in June.
In a statement sent Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that Dodd and Mucarsel-Powell are confident that Biden will “strengthen collaboration and respect to achieve a bright future for the Americas.”
Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut between 1981 and 2011, was for three decades a member of the Senate subcommittee on Latin America and the Caribbean.
His interest in the region began before he won a seat in the Senate, during the 1960s, when he joined President John Kennedy’s Peace Corps (1961-2963) and served as a volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Psaki explained.
For her part, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, born in Ecuador in 1971, was a congresswoman between 2019 and 2021, becoming the first Democratic and Latina woman to represent a Florida district.
The White House highlighted the role of this former congresswoman in defending “Venezuelans fleeing their country” and in her support for the Temporary Protected Status immigration program.
Psaki stressed that the IX Summit of the Americas, which will bring together leaders from the region in Los Angeles from June 6 to 10, “will play a central role in shaping the future of the Americas at a critical moment.”
It is expected that this summit, the second organized by the United States after the original edition in Miami in 1994, will address a regional migration pact, in addition to the covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis.
So far, eight ordinary summits have been held: Miami (1994), Santiago de Chile (1998), Québec (Canada, 2001), Mar del Plata (Argentina, 2005), Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago, 2009), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia, 2012), Panama (2015) and Lima (Peru, 2018).
Only at the summit held in Panama City in 2015 did all the leaders of the 35 countries that make up the Organization of American States (OAS) attend, to which Cuba also joined.