MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Orsi prepares for Washington visit after months of overtures to the Trump administration

“I am the president of Uruguay and I do not conduct foreign policy representing a political force. I do it thinking about what suits Uruguay,” the president argued

Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi will travel to Washington “in the coming months” to meet with his US counterpart Donald Trump, in a meeting that national authorities describe as agreed and awaiting only the coordination of calendars, according to Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin's confirmation on Wednesday before the Senate International Affairs Committee. The summit would crown a series of overtures by the Broad Front government toward the Republican administration, initiated in the early weeks of Orsi's term, which began in March, and which have generated controversy within the ruling coalition itself.

“We informed Senator [Andrés] Ojeda that this issue has been on the agenda of the Foreign Ministry and the president for several months, and the only problem is that President Trump's and President Orsi's calendars cross so that they can meet, hopefully, in the coming months in Washington when he visits the United States,” Lubetkin said after the legislative session. Foreign Ministry sources cited by the newspaper El País added that “there is willingness” to hold the meeting, although no date has been set. The news was first broken by Senator Andrés Ojeda, general secretary of the Colorado Party, who on Monday sent a formal note to the Presidency and to the US Embassy in Montevideo urging authorities to “make every effort” to secure the meeting.

The diplomatic move follows a regional pattern. Ojeda recalled, when arguing for his request, the recent visits to Washington by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Argentina's Javier Milei, as well as the reception granted to Colombia's Gustavo Petro despite his political differences with Trump. The Uruguayan approach has been preceded by significant gestures by Orsi toward the White House: on 2 May the president visited the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in international waters off the Uruguayan coast, a decision questioned within the Broad Front, by the PIT-CNT labor federation, and by Labor Minister Juan Castillo himself. Days earlier, Orsi had publicly expressed solidarity with Trump after an assassination attempt during the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

“I am the president of Uruguay and I do not conduct foreign policy representing a political force. I do it thinking about what suits Uruguay,” the president argued on 6 May in defense of the aircraft carrier visit. The official line seeks to detach the bilateral relationship from internal ideological debate and to project institutional continuity in ties with Washington, a historical priority of Uruguayan foreign policy regardless of the political color of the incumbent government.

The timing of the meeting will depend, according to diplomatic sources, on Trump's immediate international agenda, conditioned by the ongoing summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing, open fronts in the Middle East, and the cycle of Latin American visits that the White House has stepped up in recent weeks.