LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peruvians traumatized by years of guerrilla violence cheered in 1997 when government troops raided the Japanese ambassador’s residence to rescue hostages held for 126 days by leftist rebels.
The dramatic rescue, begun with a blast in a clandestinely dug tunnel that shattered a rebel soccer match, captivated the nation. For most Peruvians, the story that would inspire a best-selling U.S. novel ended when the hostages were freed.
But 15 years later, and despite more than 180 hearings in three different trials before Peruvian courts, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is questioning the fate of the rebels, all 14 of whom were killed. Evidence suggests that three were summarily executed, including a 17-year-old girl, even after surrendering.
One of the 72 hostages and two commandos also died in the rescue operation.
“Every government has punted this issue to the next government,” said Gloria Cano, a human rights lawyer representing relatives of the three slain rebels from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, known by its Spanish initials the MRTA. The relatives are seeking monetary damages from the Peruvian state.
Chartered by the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said the government hasn’t “completed a thorough and effective investigation” of the three deaths or identified “the material and intellectual authors.”
A public attorney assigned to the Defense Ministry claimed earlier this month that new evidence proved that at least one of the rebels, Eduardo Cruz, had not been executed. Forensic investigators who examined the bodies in 2001 call that claim baseless.
Peruvian authorities have until June 27 to file a preliminary brief with the San Jose, Costa Rica-based rights court, which is expected to rule next year.
Although Peru accepts the court’s jurisdiction as a party to the convention that established it, President Ollanta Humala, a former army lieutenant colonel, has accused the commission of improper meddling, and has promised “to defend our commandos.”
Officials fear the court could order a retrial for 11 commandos who were cleared by a military tribunal in 2004 of any wrongdoing.
The rescue remains a source of national pride and inspired the novel “Bel Canto” by U.S. author Ann Patchett and now an opera based on the book.
President Alberto Fujimori, who helped plan and ordered the raid, saw his popularity surge afterward.
Although a minor player compared to the Shining Path in the bloody Peruvian civil conflict that began in the 1980s and had all but ended by 1997, the Tupac Amaru group was also widely abhorred. The group didn’t engage in random bombings of civilians like the Shining Path, but it did kidnap wealthy Peruvians, rob banks and launch targeted assassinations.
A public opinion poll in January found that 67 percent of Peruvians believe the Inter-American court should not be hearing the case, although 39 percent believe some rebels were executed after surrendering. The poll by the Ipsos-Apoyo firm of 1,200 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
The rebels had stormed the ambassador’s residence during a pre-Christmas soiree, demanding freedom for hundreds of fellow rebels as well as Lori Berenson, an American now on parole after serving 15 years in prison for aiding the group.
The star witness in the Inter-American court’s case is Hidetaka Ogura, then the Japanese Embassy’s first secretary. After retiring from his country’s diplomatic service in 2001, Ogura went public, saying he saw the 36-year-old Cruz and the other two rebels alive after commandos secured the residence.
Ogura did not respond to repeated attempts by The Associated Press to reach him through his university in Japan, where he is a Spanish professor. Cano said Ogura will not visit Peru because he fears for his safety.
“He was a fervent backer of the communists and showed it during the entire time he was in the embassy, with his closeness to the terrorists,” said Luis Giampietri, a retired navy admiral and former vice president who was also a hostage and vehemently denies any extra-judicial killings.
He calls the mission “a clean and extraordinary operation considered the most successful in the history of hostage rescue operations.”
A classified U.S. cable made public five years ago, however, says Fujimori had ordered that there be no rebel survivors.
“Because of this, even MRTA who were taken alive did not survive the rescue operation,” said the June 11, 1997, Defense Intelligence Agency communication obtained by the independent Washington-based National Security Archive.
Fujimori fled to Japan in 2000 as his government crumbled in an unrelated corruption scandal. He was later arrested trying to return and is serving 25 years in prison on corruption and human rights convictions.
Under the Fujimori administration, Cano noted, forensic investigators were prevented from analyzing the crime scene. “There were no evidentiary photos, no adequate fingerprints, nothing,” she said.
Clyde Snow, a renowned U.S. forensic pathologist who helped examine the bodies of all 14 rebels after their 2001 exhumation, said that in the case of Cruz, a single bullet entered through the back of his neck, “which I’ve always said is the hallmark of extra-judicial executioners throughout the world.” Eight of the rebels were shot from behind.
“I consider these guys, they were terrorists, breaking the law,” said Snow. “But those who were trying to surrender and were extra-judicially killed, now that was a line that was crossed … they should have been given fair trials.”
Peruvian courts have been trying four men for allegedly ordering the killings, but the cases have moved at a glacial pace, as the Inter-American commission noted. The defendants include Fujimori’s intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, and the former army chief, Nicolas Hermoza. Both are serving 25-year prison terms for ordering killings of civilians.
Another defendant, then-army Col. Jesus Zamudio, is a fugitive but managed to renew his national ID card in 2008 and sign his pension rights over to his wife, suggesting that he remains in Peru. The fourth, former army Col. Roberto Huaman, was freed from jail last year because the case remained unresolved.
All the slain rebels, on the other hand, were buried in unmarked graves.
Relatives of 25-year-old Victor Peceros and 17-year-old Herma Melendez, the other two rebels whose deaths are the subject of the Inter-American court case, said they didn’t learn of the deaths until four years later.
The relatives say they have been stigmatized and hurt financially ever since.
Peceros’ mother, Nemecia Pedrasa, said three of her other sons and her husband were jailed for up to four months in 2002 simply for being related to “the terrorist Peceros.”
Cruz’s brother, Edgard, was fired from his job as an attorney that same year after discussing the case with reporters, said lawyer Cano, and wouldn’t agree to talk to the AP.
Pedrasa said she and her husband, who grow coffee in the eastern jungle, spent all their meager savings to get him and their sons out of prison and travel back and forth to Lima seeking justice.
Now, they just want compensation, and peace.
If Peceros hadn’t died, said his mother, looking older than her 58 years. “I would be able to visit him in prison, to see him, to caress him, because he was the first of my children.”
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QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Ecuador’s legislature has passed a bill that would require banks to forgive any outstanding debt on mortgages for first-time home buyers of properties worth up to $146,000 if they default and forfeit the home.
The measure, aimed at discouraging a real estate bubble of the type that has caused so much pain in the United States and Europe, won praise from many Ecuadoreans on Wednesday. The country’s banking industry did not immediately comment.
Approved Tuesday evening by a 68-21 vote, the bill also covers loans by banks to first-time purchasers of automobiles that cost up to $29,200.
President Rafael Correa, a leftist economist whose social spending has made him widely popular, praised the legislation but did not say whether he would sign it or possibly seek amendments.
The president, who constantly rails against Ecuador’s “oligarchs” and has already moved to diminish the power of banks, accused the lawmakers who voted against the measure of “defending the bankers, not the depositors.”
The law appears to be unique.
San Diego State University economist Michael Lea, a real estate specialist, said the only similar measure he was aware of was the creation of a national housing bank by the leftist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua after it won power in 1979.
Ecuador’s Association of Private Banks did not comment on the new legislation, though its director, Cesar Robalino, previously said the measure would discourage new home construction and make getting mortgages more difficult for consumers. He told a radio station Wednesday that a commission of three bankers was seeking a meeting with Correa to discuss the legislation, among other issues.
Pablo Davalos, an economist at Catholic University, said the move would be good for most Ecuadoreans.
“This law is positive for the consumer and negative for the banker, who now has to increase his reserves and that means less liquidity and less profit for the bankers,” Davalos said.
Lea said the housing bank created by the Sandinistas turned out to be “fairly ugly” as people were allowed to essentially stop paying their debt and the government had to step in and make up the shortfall. He called the Ecuadorean law “a big deterrent to any future lending.”
The bill’s sponsor, Paco Velasco of Correa’s governing Alianza Pais, told reporters that if Spain had passed a similar law a decade ago it could have avoided its costly real estate bubble.
Spain is now the focus of Europe’s debt crisis, its banks burdened with tens of billions of dollars in bad loans from the bubble that burst in 2008, mostly affecting Europe and the United States. On Wednesday, it said it would effectively nationalize its fourth-largest bank.
Blamed for the housing bubble, in the U.S. in particular, were profit-hungry mortgage lenders who made loans to poorly qualified buyers and financial institutions that bundled those low-quality mortgages together and sold them as financial products whose value later plummeted.
No such bubble occurred in Latin America, where banks were more conservative. Housing prices in Ecuador have thus never fallen to levels where banks, after recovering foreclosed homes, have gone after other assets of those who defaulted.
“This law is good because often we debtors don’t have secure work or income. So in the worst of cases, where one must return an apartment, at least they don’t suffer further,” said Natalia Quintero, a secretary in a lawyer’s office who is buying an apartment in Quito’s center.
Another new home-buyer, communications engineer Eduardo Benitez, was also pleased with the law. “Whatever law protects the common people is always welcome,” he said.
In Ecuador, 63 percent of families own their own home, according the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Mortgage interest rates range between 8.5 percent and 10.25 percent, and home mortgage lending has been growing at 20.7 percent a year.
Analyst Risa Grais-Targow of the Eurasia Group, said she believes it is part of Correa’s preparations for a re-election bid next year.
“A move to protect consumers obviously plays nicely to a lot of his potential voter base,” she said. “We’ve seen a recent track record of (him) infringing on or targeting the financial sector.”
That includes laws that prohibit banking executives from sitting on the boards of corporations in other business sectors and that are forcing Ecuador’s biggest banks to sell financial service businesses including insurance and stock brokerages.
The strategy differs from that of Correa’s ally in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, who has nationalized about a dozen banks and now controls about a quarter of the country’s banking sector.
A presidential election date is not set and Correa, in office since January 2007, has not declared his candidacy.
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Associated Press writer Gonzalo Solano reported this story in Quito and Frank Bajak reported from Lima, Peru. AP writer Alex Veiga in Los Angeles, California, contributed to this report.
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s main rebel group said in a statement made public Sunday that it holding “in the quality of a prisoner of war” a French journalist missing since disappearing a week ago during combat.
The ruling secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, did not say if or when the insurgency plans to release Romeo Langlois.
It noted, in a communique published online that Langlois “was dressed in military clothing of the regular army” on April 28 when security forces he was accompanying on a cocaine lab-destruction mission were attacked by the FARC.
Accompanying the military on such missions serves the government’s propaganda purposes, said the statement, which was dated May 3.
“We think the minimum that can be expected for the recuperation of (Langlois’) full mobility is the opening of a national and international debate over the freedom to inform,” it continued. “Journalists that Colombia’s armed forces take with it on military operations don’t adhere to the impartial purpose of informing about reality.”
Colombia’s defense minister has said that during the combat Langlois removed the helmet and flak jacket that the army had provided and identified himself as a civilian.
The statement, published by the sympathetic Sweden-based ANNCOL news agency, began with the FARC leadership announcing “the detention in the quality of prisoner of war the French journalist Romeo Langlois by units of the FARC’s 15th Front.”.
It warned Colombia’s military not to try to rescue Langlois, referring to previous instances when it has killed “prisoners” during perceived government rescue attempts.
Earlier on Sunday, in a video released by independent journalist Karl Penhaul, a man who identifies himself as a rebel squadron leader said Langlois was lightly wounded in an arm but was out of danger.
It shows armed men and women in fatigues in a jungle area.
The rebel says they are from the 15th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and that it captured Langlois in a 7-hour firefight.
He said that now that the rebels know Langlois is a journalist “we hope to quickly overcome this impasse.”
Langlois, 35, was on assignment for France24 television and has also done work for the newspaper Le Figaro. He has been working in Colombia for more than a decade.
Penhaul said the video, released on YouTube, was recorded Saturday.
In its statement, the FARC’s secretariat complained about its own Web site being “attacked and permanently blocked.”
Indeed, the FARC periodically changes Web addresses, whether because of cyberattacks or removals ordered by foreign governments where they are hosted.
The FARC took up arms in 1964 and is estimated to have about 8,000 fighters.
It has in recent years suffered a series of major setbacks, including the killing last year of its top commander, Alfonso Cano, and has been urging the government to enter into a peace dialogue.
President Juan Manuel Santos says the FARC has not met his conditions for talks, and insists it must honor its February pledge to halt ransom kidnappings.
The rebels released last month what they said were their last “political prisoners,” 10 soldiers and police they had held for as much as 14 years.
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Associated Press writer Frank Bajak reported from Lima, Peru
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A woman who says she was the prostitute who triggered the U.S. Secret Service scandal in Colombia said Friday that the agents involved were “idiots” for letting it happen, and declared that if she were a spy and sensitive information was available, she could have easily obtained it.
The woman said she spent five hours in a Cartagena, Colombia, hotel room with an agent, and while she barely got cab fare out of him, she could have gotten information that would have compromised the security of U.S. President Barack Obama if the agent had any. “Totally,” she replied when asked.
“The man slept all night,” said the woman, who was identified by her lawyer as Dania Londono Suarez. “If I had wanted to, I could have gone through all his documents, his wallet, his suitcase.”
She said in the 90-minute interview with Colombia’s W Radio conducted in Spain that no U.S. investigator had been in touch with her, although reporters descended on her home a week after the incident when a taxi driver led them to it.
“They could track me anywhere in the world that I go but they haven’t done so,” she said, speaking in Spanish. “If the Secret Service agents were idiots, imagine the investigators.”
That alarmed a U.S. congressman who is monitoring the case.
Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement on Friday expressing concern that investigators “have been unable to locate and interview two of the female foreign nationals involved,” including Londono. “I have asked the Secret Service for an explanation of how they have failed to find this woman when the news media seems to have no trouble doing so.”
Eight Secret Service agents have lost their jobs in the scandal, although there is no evidence any of the 10 women interviewed by U.S. investigators for their roles in it have any connection to terrorist groups, King said earlier this week.
In the interview, Londono called the Secret Service agents caught up in the scandal “fools for being from Obama’s security and letting all this happen.”
“When I said, ‘I’m going to call the police so they pay me my money,’ and it didn’t bother them, didn’t they see the magnitude of the problem?” she said.
Londono said the man she slept with never identified himself as a member of Obama’s advance security detail for the April 14-15 Summit of the Americas and said she saw nothing in his room that would have indicated the man’s job other than a brown uniform.
Londono said the man had agreed to pay her $800, but that she never would have made a public fuss about his failure to pay had she known he was part of Obama’s security detail and realized the repercussions it would have for her.
“My life is practically destroyed,” she said. “My name is in the gutter.”
Her photo has been splashed all over the Internet since a newspaper took it off Facebook a week after the incident, when she said she fled Colombia fearing for her life.
“I was afraid they might retaliate,” she said, saying she feared for herself and her family after looking up Secret Service on the Internet and seeing that some agents were sharpshooters.
The mother of a 9-year-old boy she said she had when she was 17, Londono said she would happily sell her story now and pose nude.
She said she had contracted one of Colombia’s top lawyers, Abelardo De la Espriella. He confirmed her identity for The Associated Press and said she called him for the first time earlier Friday, recommended by the radio host who interviewed Londono.
He said he didn’t see that there was any criminal infraction in the incident. Prostitution is legal in Colombia.
“Let’s see how we can help her,” De la Espriella said of Londono.
Londono appeared in the interview, part of which was also broadcast by Colombia’s Caracol TV, with just a little makeup, her fingernails painted white and wearing a tight green dress.
W Radio asked that the location of the interview not be disclosed for Londono’s security, and she later gave an interview to the Spanish radio network Cadena Ser, which said it was recorded in one of its studios.
Londono giggled nervously and refused to answer prying questions from reporters from several international news media during the W Radio interview on topics such as the nature of her sex act with the Secret Service agent.
She said that the desk clerk at the Hotel Caribe called at 6:30 a.m. to tell her it was time to leave, and the agent addressed her with an insult in telling her to get out.
Dania said it was nearly three hours after the man kicked her out of the room and she alerted a Colombian policeman stationed on the hallway before three colleagues of the agent, who had refused to open his door after giving her $30, scraped together $250 and paid her, she said.
“‘The only thing they said was ‘Please, please. No police, no police,’” she said.
Later that day, April 12, the agent and 11 other Secret Service colleagues who may have also had prostitutes in their rooms at the five-star hotel were sent home, under investigation for alleged misconduct.
Londono’s story agrees with what investigators in Washington have disclosed.
She said she met the man, one of 10-11 agents in a Cartagena bar, and accompanied him back to the hotel, stopping on the way to buy condoms.
She said the other agents at the bar were all drunk.
“They bought alcohol like they were buying water,” she said, though she never saw any evidence that any of them used illegal drugs.
She said the man she was with was only moderately intoxicated. She said she did not know his name.
Londono said that she went to Dubai after the scandal broke and spent time with someone she had previously met in Cartagena. She would not say whether that person had been a client.
She said she was charging between $600 and $800 for sex while working in Cartagena and only accepted foreigners as clients, considering herself an “escort.”
Asked why she became a prostitute, Londono said “it’s an easy life” that would allow her to study and provide for her son.
At one point in the interview, her mother was brought in by phone, and described the shame she felt.
Londono said her mother did not know until the scandal broke that she was a prostitute and had been medicated for depression.
She said her son was unaware of his mother’s celebrity, and said she considers herself finished with prostitution.
“This has cured me of it all,” Londono said. “Even if I’m not hired for the magazine covers, I will never do it again.”
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Associated Press writer Frank Bajak contributed from Lima, Peru.
CARTAGENA, Colombia (AP) — The Secret Service sex scandal has spawned X-rated jokes, inspired a spicy song set to a local Caribbean beat, and made an unlikely celebrity of a 42-year-old taxi driver who lives with his mother and now seems to be in hiding.
With no other decent leads locally, scoop-hungry journalists fought all week for the favor of Jose Pena, the president of the Hotel Caribe taxi stand who happened to drive home the prostitute who set the scandal in motion.
Fiercely competitive reporters from tabloids to TV networks accused one another of bidding up Pena’s fees. He would disappear for hours in the employ of one or another, the spurned reporters redialing him incessantly, filling his voice mail box with entreaties.
It was Pena, after all, who led journalists to the whitewashed, two-family house on a quiet cul-de-sac on the edge of town where he said the woman lived with her 9-year-old son. And he described how the woman told him a Secret Service agent refused to pay her full fee and locked his door at the five-star hotel the morning of April 12.
“He’s the most important man in the world this week,” joked fellow taxi driver William Jimenez.
Colombians had riotous fun at the Americans’ expense on Twitter and Facebook, with one wag tying the charge that one of the agents had tried to shortchange one of the prostitutes with the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement whose implementation was announced just after the summit:
“I don’t think any mistake was made. They thought that now that the FTA was approved there was no need to pay tariffs.”
There was also a sense of indignation. “It’s pretty clear that they want to treat Latin America as a brothel,” the Colombian newsmagazine Semana quoted one tweet as saying about the U.S. agents.
The scandal broke after police and hotel security workers were called into the dispute between the woman and the agent over money.
Soon, 11 agents were headed back to the U.S. to face misconduct charges. Six have since lost their jobs, and the U.S. military is separately investigating 11 servicemen. U.S. investigators have determined that about 20 Colombian women spent the night at the Caribe with members of President Barack Obama’s security detail less than 48 hours before his arrival for a summit.
“The secret agents didn’t think about Obama. All they thought about was being in bed,” said the song taking off on the scandal that got its video release Saturday evening at a Cartagena club.
Several dozen U.S.-based reporters had rushed to the colonial Caribbean port to report on the developing sex scandal, joining those already there to cover last weekend’s Summit of the Americas.
They’ve scoured bars and discotheques that prostitutes frequent, with names like Isis and Elektra, logging hours and downing overpriced cocktails while trying to find at least one of the women who allegedly spent the night with members of Obama’s security detail.
It didn’t help that Hotel Caribe workers were muzzled by their employer and normally helpful senior Colombian police and government officials also clammed up.
One news outlet eventually published photos, found on Facebook, that it said were of the woman who set off the scandal.
The Facebook page was taken down soon after, but by then reporters had a photo of the bikini-clad woman to help in their search. It was shown to desk clerks, maids and bellhops in hopes they would identify her as having been at the hotel.
Neighbors of the home where Pena took journalists identified the woman as “Dania,” a woman in her mid-20s from the Caribbean island of San Andres who abandoned her home Wednesday morning with her 9-year-old son and live-in maid and went into hiding.
Other taxi drivers also tried to cash in on the media frenzy. One tried to charge a reporter eight times the customary fee.
“Pena charged 500,000 pesos ($280) for the same thing,” driver Marcos Miranda objected after a two-hour hire before resignedly accepting the equivalent of $30.
Yet Pena also broke a code of silence that protects sex workers and others, including cabbies, who take a cut of their earnings in exchange for finding clients, several drivers said privately.
Pena sounded distressed Friday in a phone conversation. Colombian prosecutors had called him in for questioning later that morning and he said he was afraid of being thrown in jail.
An Associated Press reporter who was still trying to catch up with him to have him identify the published photo as the woman he drove home from the Hotel Caribe encountered a worried mother, Gloria Hoyos, at the family home. “I don’t eat. I don’t sleep,” she said, fighting back tears.
By Saturday, Pena’s dizzying ride helping the media was over.
His one-story house in a lower-middle class neighborhood, where his 68-year-old mother sells gelatin desserts and flavored ice through barred windows, was shuttered and sealed with a padlock.
The woman known has Dania, meanwhile, has retained a lawyer named Marlon Betancourt, who has refused requests by the AP for comment. But he told another news organization that his client expects to sue the Secret Service agent for abusive behavior.
And his client intends to sell her story.
A police officer at the prosecutor’s office, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, predicted big things for “Dania.”
“She’s going to be famous,” he said. “Just wait. She’ll be on the cover of Playboy magazine.”
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Associated Press writers Pedro Mendoza and Marko Alvarez in Cartagena and Vivian Sequera in Bogota contributed to this report.
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Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak
CARTAGENA, Colombia (AP) — U.S. President Barack Obama got the expected lectures Saturday from Western Hemisphere leaders over his insistence on vetoing Cuban participation in future summits and his intransigence on abandoning a drug war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and undermined governments.
The opening salvo came from the summit’s host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who reiterated the message nearly all his colleagues harped on: Drop attempts to isolate Cuba .
“There is no justification for that path that has us anchored in a Cold War overcome now for several decades,” Santos said, suggesting a change might encourage reforms on the communist-led island.
“It is the hour to overcome the paralysis produced by ideological stubbornness and seek minimal consensus so that process of change arrives at a good result,” he said.
Speaking to a CEO summit earlier, he also urged a reconsideration of the war on narcotics, citing the irony of Colombia’s successes: While it extradites hundreds of alleged drug traffickers for trial to the United States, criminals turn to other countries where law enforcement is weaker.
“We know that our success has (hurt) affected other countries and we are pedaling and pedaling and pedaling like we’re on a stationary bike,” he said.
“The moment has come to analyze if what we’re doing is best or if we can find a more effective and cheaper alternative for society.”
For some, the summit was overshadowed by an embarrassing scandal involving prostitutes and U.S. Secret Service agents that widened when the U.S. military said five service members staying at the same hotel might have also been involved in misconduct.
U.S. Rep. Peter King told the Associated Press after being briefed on the investigation that “close to” all 11 of the Secret Service agents who were put on leave Saturday had taken women to their rooms at a hotel a few blocks from where Obama is staying.
The New York Republican said the women were “presumed to be prostitutes” but investigators were interviewing the agents.
Three waiters at the hotel told the AP that about a dozen U.S. government workers they presumed were the Secret Service agents had spent about a week drinking heavily. One of them said he witnessed a man appearing to be their supervisor line them up and scold them on the hotel’s back terrace at about 4 p.m. Thursday.
The agents were apparently ordered to leave because they immediately packed their bags and left, said the waiter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because, like his colleagues, he feared for his job.
Against the backdrop of the scandal, the fate of the summit’s final declaration is uncertain because the foreign ministers of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay said Friday that their presidents wouldn’t sign it unless the U.S. and Canada removed their veto of future Cuban participation.
The charismatic Obama may be able to charm the region’s leaders as he did in 2009 with a pledge of being an “equal partner,” but he will also have to prove the U.S. truly values their friendship and a stake in their growth.
In large part, declining U.S. influence comes down to waning economic clout as China gains on the U.S. as a top trading partner. It has surpassed the U.S. in trade with Brazil, Chile and Peru and is a close second in Argentina and Colombia.
The Cuba issue led Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to boycott the summit, while moderates such as Santos and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil said there should be no more America’s summits without the communist island.
Obama’s administration has greatly eased family travel and remittances to Cuba, but has not dropped the half-century U.S. embargo against the island, nor moved to let it back into the Organization of American States, under whose auspices the summit is organized.
One potentially prickly confrontation for Obama was averted Saturday when Venezuela’s foreign minister announced that President Hugo Chavez was skipping the summit. The minister, Nicolas Maduro, said Chavez took the decision because of a medical recommendation related to his treatment for cancer.
Chavez was heading instead to Cuba to continue radiation treatment. He had dominated attention at past summits with his trademark fiery speeches.
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Associated Press writers Libardo Cardona, Pedro Mendoza, Marco Sibaja and Julie Pace contributed to this report.
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Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak
Vivian Sequera on Twitter: http://twitter.com/vsequera
FILE - In this Dec. 19, 1996 file photo, police snipers look toward the Japanese ambassador's residence compound from a nearby building in Lima, Peru. Peruvians traumatized by years of guerrilla violence cheered in 1997 when government troops raided the Japanese ambassadors residence to rescue hostages held for 126 days by leftist rebels. But 15 years later, and despite many hearings in several different trials before Peruvian courts, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is questioning the fate of the rebels, all 14 of whom were killed. Evidence suggests that three were summarily executed, including a teenage girl, even after surrendering. (AP Photo/Yoshiyuki Komazaki, File) JAPAN OUT(Credit: AP) 
This Friday, May 4, 2012 frame grab taken from the Spanish radio station Cadena SER website shows Dania Londono Suarez during an interview at an undisclosed location. Suarez says she was the woman who triggered the U.S. Secret Service scandal in Colombia. Suárez also says she never would have complained about not being paid by an agent had she known he was part of President Barack Obama's security detail. (AP Photo/Cadena SER)(Credit: AP) 
People walk past Hotel El Caribe in Cartagena, Colombia, late Thursday, April 19, 2012. Eleven Secret Service employees are accused of misconduct in connection with a prostitution scandal at the hotel last week before President Barack Obama's arrival for the Summit of the Americas. The identities of two Secret Service supervisors who have been pushed out of the agency in the wake of the scandal have been revealed. (AP Photo/Pedro Mendoza)(Credit: AP) 
President Barack Obama, left, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton attend the plenary session of the sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, Saturday April 14, 2012. The summit brings together presidents and prime ministers from Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and the U.S. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)(Credit: AP) 