Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday he won’t attend the Summit of the Americas hosted by the United States this week in Los Angeles because some of the region's countries were not invited.
“There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” he said.
A senior Biden administration official confirmed to NBC News that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited to the summit.
In his place, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard will attend, López Obrador said during his daily news conference.
For weeks, López Obrador had been insisting all countries be invited and threatened to boycott the meeting if they were excluded.
Other regional leaders, like Honduran President Xiomara Castro, have said they won't attend if Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are not on the guest list.
The Biden administration has said it did not want to include undemocratic countries to the summit. The Inter-American Democratic Charter, signed in 2001 by all countries in the region, except Cuba, made it a requirement that only democratically elected leaders can attend.
The U.S. has said immigration will be one of the main topics during the summit. Mexico is one of the main sources of migration, calling into question how much progress can be made on regional cooperation without Mexico's president at the summit.
Held every three years in a different country, the ninth Summit of the Americas is taking place in Los Angeles from June 6-10. It's the first U.S.-hosted summit since the inaugural event in Miami in 1994.
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