Summit final document aims at U.S.

(PHOTO: Jon Super/AP/Corbis)

PANAMA CITY

We’ve known for a while that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was planning to stage an anti-U.S. show at this weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Panama, but a copy of the draft final declaration of the meeting that I obtained this week shows that he will seek much more: a formal, region-wide condemnation of the United States.

Granted, he’s not likely to get his way, but the question is whether he will get language in the summit’s final statement that will be explicit enough to allow him to return home claiming to have diplomatically defeated President Barack Obama at the mega-summit of more than 30 leaders of the Americas.

The current draft of the summit’s final declaration, “Prosperity with Equity: The Challenge of Cooperation in the Americas, ” was signed March 31 after four rounds of negotiations by representatives of all participating governments. They agreed on most of the content, except for three issues proposed by Venezuela and Nicaragua.

A three-paragraph section proposed by Venezuela in the preamble of the document would “reject the imposition of unilateral coercive measures” that interfere in countries’ internal affairs, “such as the March 9, 2015, Executive Decree against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela imposed by the United States of America.”

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