Hear
WASHINGTON.- In a fiery speech in Congress that was accompanied by a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, the Republican representative Maria Elvira Salazara declared fan of President Javier Milei, defined the Argentine president as “a moral reference for the Western Hemisphere”and considered that Argentina should be included in the Alliance for Economic Prosperity in the Americas (APEP, according to its acronym in English).
“Today there is no president in Latin America with a more pro-freedom agenda than Javier Milei. He is working to turn around years of economic mistakes, in a country with tremendous but wasted potential.“, that is why the legislator and former host of the CNN and Telemundo networks, daughter of Cubans, urged the North American president to incorporate Argentina into the APEP, a request that she had already made last October for Paraguay.
The APEP is one of the tangible legacies left by the Summit of the Americas that took place two years ago in Los Angeles, a meeting that was marked by the controversy that sparked the absence of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the three dictatorial regimes in the region, in the eyes of Washington and several countries in the hemisphere. Biden promoted two great consensuses at that summit, one embodied in a declaration on migration, and another in the launch of this new economic partnership platform that seeks to provide a framework and bury the failures of the past, such as that of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) promoted at the time by George W. Bush.
At the meeting held last November at the White House, 11 countries were invited: Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, Barbados and Panama. But Biden said he hoped more countries would join the initiative.
In his speech in Congress in front of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Salazar – who met in Washington last week with Foreign Minister Diana Mondino – defined Milei as “the most pro-American president in Argentine history,” and cited as an example the Argentine president’s support for Blinken’s agenda: “Ukraine, Israel, anti-China, Venezuela, Cuba, Taiwan, open markets.”
Blinken responded that he had been in Argentina last February and that he would be “happy” to consider the legislator’s letter, to which Salazar responded: “We need more Milei in Latin America.”
In the letter to Biden, the legislator emphasized that the Argentine president is “fighting to escape the socialist curse”. “Milei is giving Argentina the harsh medicine you need now to put inflation under control and to retrace decades of socialist mismanagement. “What Argentina desperately needs now is the help of its like-minded allies, like the United States.”
As reported on his website, Salazar was born in Little Havana, in Miami, to parents who were exiled from Cuba. He attended Deerborne School in Coral Gables and graduated from Miami-Dade College. He has a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Miami and a master’s degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Before jumping into politics, she became famous as a journalist and television presenter. She worked at CNN, Telemundo and Mega, among other media. She has been a representative for Florida since 2021.
AP Agency
THE NATION
