Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) announced he is boycotting this week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and half a dozen other heads of state are either threatening to do the same or barred from coming. The meeting is only the latest fiasco for host Jim Crow Joe Biden but significantly shows the crumbling of  U.S. imperialism. As capitalist bosses in China and Russia expand their economic and military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, the old U.S. bosses’ “backyard” is becoming a flashpoint for inter-imperialist competition and the next world war.   
The U.S. stumbled into the Summit with vague promises to address Covid-19, economic recovery, climate change, immigration, and what the bosses call “democracy”–the dictatorship of the liberal capitalist rulers. In reality, the Summit was created in 1994 to organize the exploitation of the region’s ravaged working class and the murderous austerity enforced by the International Monetary Fund, in line with U.S. interests. But as the old liberal world order has broken down, regional bosses in the Western Hemisphere are no longer following U.S. orders.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump bailed out of the last Summit in Peru. This time around, the U.S. refused to invite Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela because of “the lack of democratic space and the human rights situations” in those countries, according to a Biden spokesperson (aljazeera.com, 6/6).  AMLO, President of  Latin America’s second-largest economy, responded with his boycott, and the leaders of Honduras, Bolivia, and Guatemala followed suit. Biden had to beg the embezzling Juan Bolsonaro of Brazil to come–and never mind that Bolsonaro is selling the Amazon forest to the highest bidders, or killing hundreds of thousands as Brazil’s anti-vaxxer-in-chief, or declaring that he might not accept the results of this October’s vote if he doesn’t win re-election.
These dances among gangsters and thieves are all about the new order–or disorder–of “non-alignment” in Latin America and the Caribbean. Regional bosses are cutting deals with the most willing imperialists and playing them off against each other. For the Chinese rulers this crisis for the U.S. is a big opportunity. China today is Latin America’s second-largest trading partner, and number one for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. In February, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez traveled to Beijing to sign up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the largest country in the region to date to tie its infrastructure to Chinese financing.
As these contradictions intensify, workers in Latin America and worldwide will continue to find themselves caught on the hamster wheel of reformism and nationalism. These workers have been waging sharp class struggle throughout  the Covid-19 pandemic. But if those struggles are channeled into voting, the only winner will be capitalist exploitation. Only when the international working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), rises up to smash this capitalist system, will we end wage slavery and inter-imperialist war for all time.
Snapshots of inter-imperialist rivalry: Mexico and Colombia
With the U.S. weakened by the split between the liberal imperialist Big Fascists of finance capital and the isolationist Small Fascists (see glossary, page 6) behind Trump,  bosses from Brazil to the Dominican Republic see the once-dominant nation as a “flailing former hegemon” (Foreign Affairs, 2/24). As a result, they are turning to China as the new game in town for export markets and investments.
In Colombia, the working class, led by Black workers, has fought death and rising poverty since the start of the pandemic. In 2020, massive street protests by young fighters were met by brutal repression by the Colombian bosses, who then channeled the rebellion toward the voting booth and nationalism.
At the same time, these bosses deepened their economic ties with China. With Gustavo Petro, a “pink-tide” fake-leftist having a good chance to win the presidential run-off election in Colombia on June 19, an even tighter embrace between Colombia and China may be in the offing (The Diplomat, May 2021).
In 2018, as class struggle intensified in Mexico, the bosses turned to another fake leftist, Lopez Obrador. As AMLO bungled Mexico’s pandemic response and devastated the economy, the ascendant Chinese imperialists stepped in with medical equipment and vaccines. As part of AMLO’s “Fourth Transformation,” the Mexican bosses’ attempt to grab a larger share of profits, the Chinese ruling class won the contract to build the first section of the Maya Train and made a $600 million loan for construction of the Dos Bocas Refinery (Americas Quarterly, January/2021). Both projects will have disastrous environmental impacts and destroy workers’ health. The rising Chinese imperialists are just as deadly to workers as the U.S. imperialists they are trying to displace.
Imperialist sights focused on Haiti
After a period of acute political instability, Haiti finds itself squarely in the crossfire of imperialist rivalry. Although historically aligned with the U.S. and bitter Chinese rival Taiwan, Haiti began to waver during the pandemic. The super-exploitation of Haitian workers by U.S. bosses has made the country the poorest in the Americas. In recent years, Haiti has been run by criminal gangs that kidnap and terrorize workers for profit. Many workers have joined the migrant caravans in Mexico, only to be violently turned away at the U.S.-Mexico border by patrols on horses with whips.
Having already consolidated their influence in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the Chinese imperialists have used vaccine diplomacy to sway Haiti into its orbit. Although the Haitian bosses are publicly reassuring the U.S. and Taiwan of their loyalty, China’s economic inducements could undermine these longtime alliances (Bloomberg, October/2021).
Meanwhile, China is also expanding military-to-military exchanges and arms sales to increase its political capital among Latin American and Caribbean bosses and anchor its strategic position in the region (Council on Foreign Relations, 4/12).
Communism, the alternative workers need
No matter which imperialist power prevails, the reality for workers in the Americas is deepening inequality and poverty, mass death from Covid-19, and state violence. But they aren’t taking this oppression lying down. In Colombia and Chile, workers and students are boldly attacking austerity measures and are fighting back against the cops (France 24, March/2022). In Haiti, garment workers went on strike for a $15 workday, another reminder for the international working class that Black women's revolutionary leadership is essential for smashing this monstrous system. In Los Angeles, immigrant workers are organizing protests to call out the racist U.S. immigration policy that  Latin American bosses have been bought off to support (LA Times, June/2022).
The international working class is angry, bold, and fighting back. But the dangers of reform, liberalism, and nationalism are always lurking. It’s not enough to oppose corrupt leaders or shout slogans against U.S. imperialism. We must smash all borders and every capitalist that profits from their existence. We must build a revolutionary communist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party, that will fight for a world run by and for workers, for a society organized to meet workers’ needs. We need you to join us in this fight to free our class. Power to the working class!