In February, leaders representing all the countries of the Americas, save the United States, Canada, and Honduras, came together to reaffirm their commitment to create a new regional multilateral organization. The get-together, which took place in Cancún, on the long stretch of gulf-coast beaches christened “the Mayan Riviera” by Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism, ended with a proposal to create the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which would stretch from the continent’s Southern Cone to the southern borders of the onetime Mexican states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. But no further north than that.
A shouting match between Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe almost upstaged the formation of the new group. After trading some headline-making insults at a private luncheon (reported to the press by third parties), they were calmed by the summit’s official host, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and Cuba’s Raúl Castro. The next day they both announced that they were ready to work together once again to strengthen the new organization and improve long-strained bilateral relations.
“What I did was respond,” Chávez told a reporter. “He said harsh things, I said harsh things, and then Raúl Castro came and Calderón came and we sat down and talked, and continued.”
Calderón and Castro calming the waters? Chávez and Uribe putting aside their mutual animosity for the sake of unity in the Americas? It’s been a long time coming. Back in 1815, Simón Bolívar wrote in his legendary “Letter From Jamaica” of his hopes that “one august congress” would one day be formed in the region; the Liberator later convened the first pan-American congress in 1826.
Perhaps none of the leaders in Cancún was more alive to this legacy than Chávez, who has built a whole political movement on the foundation of a Bolivarian heritage.
“The gringo empire,” Chávez told a Mexican reporter covering the summit, “has always wanted us to be at odds, divided, to impede what has started here, which I think is the most important: true integration from Mexico to Argentina.”
Calderón, in somewhat more circumspect language, joined the Venezuelan president in hailing the group’s political agenda. Once a new organization is in place, he told a closing press conference, “it must, as a priority, push for regional integration . . . and promote the regional agenda in global meetings.”
The purpose of the new group would be, above all, to “encourage regional integration, aiming towards the promotion of our sustainable development,” according to the summit’s declaration. Most participants were careful to say that it would not replace the Organization of American States, which most decidedly includes the colossus to the north of the Río Bravo, but would exist along side it and serve a different purpose, providing its member states a greater chance to participate in hemispheric and global affairs on a footing of greater influence and well-being.
In a lengthy declaration issued at the close of the two-day meeting, the group expressed support for creating a new regional and subregional financial architecture (above all, one that would facilitate cooperation among national banks to promote regional development), as well as the “physical integration of infrastructure,” especially the sharing of energy resources, the expansion of renewable energy, an integrated transportation network, and the cross-border movement of goods under the responsibility of a single transporter.
Like the European Community, the new Latin American group envisions integration as both a political and an economic process: the creation of a more unified (hence influential) bloc of nations on the political front; and on the economic front, the creation of a much larger “internal” market, easing dependence on the North and making possible the enactment of coordinated fiscal and monetary policies.
In itself, regional integration is neither a project of the left nor the right—those battles have to be fought internally. Rather, it is a necessary precursor to regional power and economic development. That is something that Chávez, Uribe, Castro, and Calderón—despite their enormous differences—all understand.
Fred Rosen is NACLA’s Web editor.
