Brasilia.- Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will receive delegations from 16 Caribbean countries this Friday to analyze new forms of cooperation and joint initiatives in the face of the serious humanitarian crisis suffered by Haiti.
The upcoming Brazil-Caribbean Summit will bring together the presidents of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, and Guyana, Irfaan Ali, as well as the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the vice president of Cuba, Salvador Valdés Mesa.
Also attending will be the president of Haiti's Presidential Transition Council (CPT), Fritz Alphonse Jean, while Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago will be represented at the ministerial level.
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Except for Cuba, all those countries are part of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc interested in a free trade agreement with Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, with Bolivia in the process of accession), although negotiations have never come to fruition.
The summit is part of Lula's efforts to regain the dynamism of regional integration, which has lost momentum in recent years amid the strong political polarization that divides Latin America.
A Trade and Climate Change-Focused Agenda
Brazil has proposed an agenda with five major axes, which include food security, climate change, risk and disaster management, energy transition, and maritime and air connectivity, as a way to boost tourism and trade.
Trade between Brazil and Caribbean countries as a whole reached about 4 billion dollars last year, but 75% is concentrated in trade with Guyana, Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago.
Brazilian exports totaled $2.7 billion last year, making the balance clearly unfavorable to the Caribbean, which as a whole is interested in achieving a greater presence in the market of the first Latin American economy.
Beyond trade, another central issue for Brazilian diplomacy is cooperation in the face of climate change, which especially threatens the island nations of the Caribbean, due to rising sea levels or increasingly violent hurricanes.
According to official sources, Lula will propose to the leaders gathered in Brasilia to design a joint position for COP30, which Brazil will host in the Amazonian city of Belém next November.
The Worsening of Haiti's Endless Crisis
Although it is not on the agenda, the crisis in Haiti will also be the focus of much of the debate, due to the worsening violence and the political, economic and humanitarian crisis.
According to the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (Binuh), in the first three months of this year alone, 1,617 people died and another 580 were injured due to violence involving armed gangs, self-defense groups, unorganized members of the population, and security forces.
That data does not include the hundred or so alleged members of criminal gangs shot down by drones in recent days.
This very week, the UN warned about the humanitarian crisis generated by that situation in Haiti, which will face the imminent Caribbean hurricane season without the proper food reserves, with half of its population in a situation of hunger and nearly a million internally displaced people due to violence.
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