MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel will on Thursday attend Mexico’s two hundredth anniversary of independence, forward of a summit of Latin American heads of state that can collect not too long ago elected members of a brand new “pink wave” of leftist leaders.

The presidents from Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and elsewhere will on Saturday meet on the summit of the Neighborhood of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional physique that Venezuela’s late chief Hugo Chavez helped arrange in 2011.

Diaz-Canel’s journey to Mexico is the Cuban chief’s first overseas go to since an enormous protests swept the island in July, shaking the communist authorities at a time it was struggling to include the pandemic and shortages of meals, gas and medication.

In the course of the anti-government demonstrations, Mexico threw a lifeline to Havana by sending ships loaded with gas, meals and oxygen tanks. Mexico’s leftist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador additionally sharply criticized the crippling U.S. embargo on the island.

On Saturday, the CELAC group will talk about the area’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the creation of a fund to reply to disasters derived from local weather change.

“It will likely be analyzed to see what plan Latin America and the Caribbean will comply with to have gear, vaccines, checks for some other contingency”, the Mexican Overseas Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, mentioned this week.

It’s also anticipated that Mexico, as president professional tempore of the CELAC, will push for a unified proposal to exchange or reform the Group of American States (OAS). Some CELAC members see OAS as an “interventionist” instrument of the USA.

International locations throughout the area have over the previous few years oscillated between left-wing and conservative governments, usually with radically completely different financial and social insurance policies.

Latin America’s left made its best strides with the primary so-called ‘pink-tide’ of socialist leaders within the early 2000s. However a few of these, comparable to Venezuela’s Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, have died or been toppled.

On Saturday, the brand new wave of leftist Latin leaders are anticipated to hitch Lopez Obrador, with Peru’s Pedro Castillo, Bolivia’s Luis Arce and Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez among the many 16 confirmed heads of state to attend CELAC.