[Despite difficult conditions, the dream of Latin American
integration endures. It is one that the international community,
particularly the United States, should share. ]
[[link removed]]

LATIN AMERICA IS STRONGER TOGETHER  
[[link removed]]


 

Guillaume Long
August 15, 2023
CEPR [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Despite difficult conditions, the dream of Latin American
integration endures. It is one that the international community,
particularly the United States, should share. _

The leaders of Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile
meeting at a summit in Brasília, Brazil, May 2023, Ueslei Marcelino /
Reuters

 

In May 2023, the leaders of 12 South American countries gathered in
Brasília to chart a course to regional integration. “The elements
that unite us are above ideological differences,” Brazilian
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, said at the
meeting. “We are a human, historical, cultural, economic, and
commercial entity, with common needs and hopes.” Lula called on
neighboring countries to rejoin and reform the Union of South American
Nations (UNASUR), a regional body that splintered in 2019 when half
its members withdrew because of partisan enmity. He concluded his
speech with a raft of proposals for the body’s direction:
development financing, pharmaceutical innovation, energy production,
and defense coordination.

The summit in Brasília received wide attention as the first meeting
of South America’s presidents in nine years. Yet the effort to
revive UNASUR is just the latest in a broader drive toward Latin
American integration. In January 2023, leaders from across the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) signed the
111-point Declaration of Buenos Aires, pledging to work together to
improve nutrition, eradicate hunger, develop infrastructure, and
produce vaccines. Ministerial meetings scheduled later this year
promise to expand these commitments to cover areas such as migration,
mining, and the drug trade.

Over the past two decades, such designs for Latin American integration
have stirred skepticism. Some deride the continent’s regional bodies
as meaningless multilateralism, high on rhetoric but low on substance.
Others decry them as excessively ideological, born of a knee-jerk
hostility to the United States that is less focused on finding
solutions than on sending signals of left-wing disapproval.

Yet such interpretations misunderstand the motivations for Latin
American integration and its enduring appeal. Latin American regional
bodies, including CELAC and UNASUR, were not designed as playpens for
ideological allies. Rather, they reflect an autochthonous tradition of
foreign policy — active, assertive, and autonomous — that has
grown only more attractive amid the “global Zeitenwende,” German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s phrase for the geopolitical realignment
that will define the era of pandemics, climate change, and rising
tensions between great powers. According to Scholz, European nations
are now debating how to “remain independent actors in an
increasingly multipolar world.” If that is true, then Latin America,
a region ensnared by economic dependencies and excluded from the high
table of global governance, faces an even more pressing challenge.

The urgency of integration, however, will not guarantee its success.
Latin American integration is hindered today by challenges across
multiple dimensions: across the bloc, outside the bloc, and inside
each of the countries grappling with domestic political volatility.
Allies should respond to these challenges with even stronger
diplomatic support. Latin American integration would not only ensure
greater resilience in the face of food, health, and environmental
crises. It would also make Latin America a more reliable partner for
the international community in the turbulent century to come.

New Bloc on the Block

The motivations for Latin American integration are both external and
internal. Today, many leaders across the region think that the US-led
system of hemispheric governance is broken. The Organization of
American States, which includes the United States, has suffered a
spate of recent scandals: the OAS botched a corruption probe in
Honduras in 2018, intervened to an unprecedented degree in the 2019
Bolivian election, and opened an ethics inquiry into the conduct of
its own leader, Secretary General Luis Almagro. Given these
embarrassments, several of its member states no longer see the OAS as
a credible steward of hemispheric affairs.

This crisis of confidence explained the empty chairs at the 2022
Summit of the Americas, a meeting of most OAS member states. US
President Joe Biden, who hosted the summit in Los Angeles, did not
invite the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, citing a “lack
of democratic space and the human rights situations” in the
countries. “We reject the exclusion of countries in the
continent,” said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
who boycotted the summit along with the presidents of Bolivia and
Honduras in solidarity with their excluded neighbors.

Discontent with US influence is nothing new. Controversies at the OAS
perennially remind Latin American leaders of the value of strategic
autonomy. In 2008, all 12 South American countries joined in founding
UNASUR. In 2011, 33 countries — every state south of the US border
— formed CELAC with the mission to “leave behind the old and
worn-out OAS.” Unlike the OAS, neither UNASUR nor CELAC counts the
United States or Canada as members.

Many analysts explain the rise of alternatives to the OAS as a project
of left-wing leaders of that time, including Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales. But the institutions
garnered cross-partisan support. Chávez welcomed Mexican President
Felipe Calderón, a conservative, to Caracas for the founding of CELAC
in 2011. Right-wing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera supported
UNASUR’s condemnation of a coup attempt against left-wing Ecuadorian
President Rafael Correa in 2010.

Indeed, although many commentators have described Latin American
integration as a byproduct of a left-wing “pink tide” that crested
in that era, it is in fact rooted in constitutional orders that long
predate recent trends. Brazil’s 1988 constitution, for example,
directs the government to “seek the economic, political, social and
cultural integration of the peoples of Latin America, aiming at the
formation of a Latin American community of nations.”

When US President Donald Trump was in the White House, however, the
region reversed course, and a new set of right-wing leaders such as
Colombian President Iván Duque and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro
abandoned the institutions built by their predecessors. By 2020, seven
governments had withdrawn from UNASUR, Brazil had suspended its
membership in CELAC, and the Southern Common Market — which had
overseen a tenfold increase in regional trade in the previous decade
— had been dramatically weakened by abstentions, neglect, and budget
cuts.

With the region trending toward disintegration, the Trump
administration tried to reassert US primacy in the hemisphere. The
Trump administration labeled Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela the
“troika of tyranny,” rolled back President Barack Obama’s
détente with Cuba, and launched a full-scale sanctions campaign
against Venezuela. Trump advanced US defense interests by designating
Brazil a major non-NATO ally and pressuring Duque to renege on
Colombia’s 2016 peace accords with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia. He also broke with a 50-year tradition of Latin
American leadership by appointing a US citizen to the presidency of
the Inter-American Development Bank. “Today, we proudly proclaim for
all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well,” said John
Bolton, the US national security adviser, in 2019, paying homage to US
President James Monroe and his vision of a US-dominated hemisphere.

Buy Local

Recoil from the Trump administration’s warmed-over Monroe Doctrine
was predictable. And insofar as Biden has maintained some key policies
of his predecessor such as Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of
terrorism, many Latin American leaders continue to see regional
integration as a strategy for rebalancing hemispheric relations away
from an unpredictable, unreliable, and unilateral Washington. But the
internal factors favoring Latin American integration are just as
important as the external ones.

The primary driver is development. Latin America is highly exposed to
the gales of the global economy: its COVID-19 economic contraction was
more than double the global average, and the war in Ukraine jolted its
food and energy markets, pushing inflation rates to their highest
levels in 15 years. Regional disintegration is a major source of this
vulnerability. Only 15 percent of Latin America’s total
international trade takes place between countries within the region,
compared with 55 percent for the European Union and 38 percent for
North America. Eighty-five percent of Latin America’s international
trade occurs with the United States, the EU, and China, with exports
of low-value raw materials exchanged for imports of high-value
manufactured goods and advanced technology.

The impetus for regional integration is closely connected to this
perception of dependence. In the 1950s, the influential United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean proposed a
customs union as a development strategy. Four decades later, the
Southern Common Market trade bloc would become a xxxxxx against a
US-led proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which many
feared would entrench low-value primary goods specialization in Latin
America and assure US commercial dominance in the hemisphere. Today,
both left- and right-wing leaders in Latin America remain convinced
that sustainable development can be secured only through integrated
plans for energy production, infrastructure investment, and
pharmaceutical innovation that reduce dependence on wealthy countries.

Regional integration would also bolster defense. In March 2008,
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe launched a military assault on FARC
members in Ecuador, kicking off a diplomatic row that led Ecuador to
cut ties with Colombia and caused Venezuela to move battalions to its
border with Colombia. But leaders quickly contained the risk of
regional conflict. Just nine months later, the defense ministers of
UNASUR countries formed the South American Defense Council to increase
military cooperation and establish Latin America as a “zone of
peace.” In the years that followed, the council both broadened and
deepened this mandate, founding the Center for Strategic Defense
Studies in Buenos Aires to develop policy and the School of South
American Defense in Quito to train officers. In a region once
dominated by military dictatorships and ravaged by civil wars, these
bodies were intended to enhance the trust between Latin American
armies and prevent the rivalry that typically inflates military
spending and increases the possibility of intraregional conflict.

Move as One

The potential gains from Latin American integration have never been
clearer. But the prospects for its success will depend on the ability
of the region’s leaders to overcome polarization across ideological
lines. Doing so will require diplomatic acumen and thoughtful
institutional design. Like the European Council, UNASUR has frequently
been hamstrung by its rule of consensus. Some leaders, including Lula,
have proposed restricting that consensus to only the most critical
topics, such as member accession, to prevent a veto from blocking the
path to new regional programs.

The progress of Latin American integration will also depend on the
region’s external partners, principally the United States. Both the
Biden administration and high-ranking members of the US Congress have
expressed concerns about Latin America’s increasing economic
cooperation with China and its restrained response to the war in
Ukraine. “We are losing our positional advantage in this hemisphere,
and immediate action is needed to reverse this trend,” Admiral Craig
Faller, then the commander of the United States Southern Command, said
in 2021. The question remains whether the United States will accept an
increasing degree of strategic autonomy south of its borders.

Even in the absence of US intervention, however, the window of
opportunity for regional integration may be smaller than Latin
America’s leaders hope. Across the continent, presidents have come
to power with slim majorities in the popular vote and small minorities
in their respective legislatures. In many of the most historically
robust liberal democracies — Brazil, Chile, and Colombia among them
— the opposition has been radicalized, risking the erosion of
democratic institutions if not outright violence. Hampered at home,
governments may struggle to invest the political capital necessary to
forge regional institutions that can withstand backlash from domestic
opponents.

Despite these difficult conditions, the dream of Latin American
integration endures. It is one that the international community,
particularly the United States, should share. A more integrated Latin
America would mean more reliable partners, thriving economies, and
resilient democracies. But the clock is ticking. At the regional
summit in Brasília in May, Lula gave the gathered presidents just 120
days to present a road map to South American integration. If the
region succeeds, the United States should cease its efforts to divide
the bloc or isolate its members and instead encourage Latin America to
travel that road.

This article was published by Foreign Affairs  See article on
original website
[[link removed]]

_Guillaume Long is a senior policy analyst at CEPR.  Prior to
joining CEPR, Guillaume held several cabinet positions in the
government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister
of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently,
he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United
Nations in Geneva._

_David Adler is General Coordinator of the Progressive International._

_The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was established in
1999 to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and
social issues that affect people’s lives. In order for citizens to
effectively exercise their voices in a democracy, they should be
informed about the problems and choices that they face. CEPR is
committed to presenting issues in an accurate and understandable
manner, so that the public is better prepared to choose among the
various policy options._

_CEPR was co-founded by economists Dean Baker
[[link removed]] and Mark Weisbrot
[[link removed]]. Our Advisory Board
[[link removed]] includes Nobel Laureate
economists ROBERT SOLOW and JOSEPH STIGLITZ; JANET GORNICK,
Professor at the CUNY Graduate School and Director of the Luxembourg
Income Study; and RICHARD FREEMAN, Professor of Economics at Harvard
University._

* Latin America
[[link removed]]
* Brazil
[[link removed]]
* Colombia
[[link removed]]
* Ecuador
[[link removed]]
* Chile
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]