US president, Joe Biden, committed  Friday during a summit on development and migration, to promote green bonds and facilitate the investment of billions of dollars in Latin America so that it can "choose" between the United States and " the Chinese debt trap.

"The United States is already by far the largest source of investment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and we will ensure that our closest neighbors know that they can choose between debt trap diplomacy and high-quality transparent approaches for infrastructure and development," he said at the first summit of the Alliance for Economic Prosperity in the Americas (APEP). The United States, where 63 million Hispanics live, accuses China, an unavoidable trading partner in the region, of using debt to achieve strategic objectives.

To counter Beijing's growing influence, Biden announced that "the United States International Development Finance Corporation and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launch a new investment platform to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of sustainable infrastructure" In America. The money will go primarily to "strengthening critical supply chains, modern ports, clean energy networks (and) digital infrastructure" as "the building blocks" of "a competitive and resilient economy,"

The energy transition and environmental protection are also in the sights of Washington, which is committed to promoting, in collaboration with the IDB, a fund with green and blue bonds, both mechanisms linked to environmental protection of the type that led Ecuador to move forward restructuring debt to free up money for the care of nature.

Biden is meeting at the White House with the leaders of Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Canada and Barbados, and with the foreign ministers of Mexico and Panama. Just before the summit, the representatives of the 12 countries that make up this forum, created in 2022, held a working breakfast with the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen.

The first working session of the APEP, which will be held every two years, will take place in turbulent times.

Several of the representatives of participating countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Chile arrived angry in Washington over an issue that has nothing to do with the summit but could be brought up: the Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip, which have caused more than 9,000 dead, , in retaliation for an attack by members of the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israel in which at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, died.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric was the first to address the issue. On Thursday, as he left a meeting with Biden, he did not mince words: "What is happening in the Gaza Strip is simply unacceptable" and "We do not accept being made to choose between one side or the other" because " "We choose humanity."