President Alberto Fernández will travel to this Tuesday Brazil attending a summit of South American presidents trying to do that Unasur. This Monday he met with the President-elect of Paraguay, Santiago Pena, beginning of a week marked by the regional agenda. To Brasil Alberto will travel to Bolivia to inaugurate his office alongside his counterpart Luis Arcethe first electrical connection works between the two countries.
Tonight, Fernández and his entourage will leave for Brasilia to attend the event Conclave organized by the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in the second scale of this week’s regional agenda. Since Lula came to power, the Argentine leader has been trying to speed up integration with Brasilia and the Mercosur countries, and has focused on rehabilitating the South American bloc, of which former President Néstor Kirchner was the first secretary-general.
The meeting of the Presidents of Unasur will take place tomorrow from 10 a.m. at the Itamaraty Palace in Brasiliawith an open agenda and an estimated completion time of 18:00, Argentine government sources informed Télam. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is already in Brasilia. After the summit, a dinner is planned at the Palacio de la Alvorada to honor the participants.
The aim of the meeting is to motorize Unasur, which with the return of Argentina and Brazil again has the six countries necessary to hold meetings, since it states in its founding letter that it must have half the members what the case is 12 The six countries that currently make up Unasur are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela. The remaining six are Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. All were invited by the Brazilian government, as Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira explained in detail last Thursday. The agenda of the meeting will be open-ended, with the main idea of calling on the missing countries to rejoin Unasur.
In essence, Colombia and Chile would be the closest, although to return to the panel they will have to go through their parliament, the sources added. Likewise, the Latin American integration policy is discussed and the conclusion is drawn if Unasur is the best mechanism to achieve it and in this way gain more political weight – which already had its first gesture with the return of Argentina and Brazil, the Fernández and Lula this year – and that it is a key strategic space for South America’s international presence.
This activity will be the Brazilian President’s first concrete political act, in which he will demonstrate his will to create the necessary consensus that will confirm his vocation to lead this new integration process. The founding treaty of Unasur (TCU) was signed on May 23, 2008 during the Extraordinary Meeting of Heads of State and Government in the city of Brasilia, Brazil. It came into effect in 2011.
The General Secretaries of Unasur were Néstor Kirchner between May and October 2010; María Emma Mejía, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia, between May 2011 and June 2012; Ali Rodríguez Araque, former Venezuelan Foreign Minister; between June 2012 and August 2014; and Ernesto Samper Pizano, former President of Colombia, between August 2014 and January 2017. On April 12, 2019, during Mauricio Macri’s presidency, the Argentine government had decided to withdraw from the organization.
On April 6, Foreign Minister Cafiero published on his Twitter account the note signed the day before officially returning Argentina to Unasur: “For the Argentine government, any entity that adds national decision-making power and the consolidation of an increasingly integrated region is with. “More trade within the zone and a better level of cooperation in pursuing its development,” he said on the occasion.
The Brasilia summit comes days after Lula herself asked International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive director Kristalina Georgieva to “give time” to Argentina. to meet financial obligations to the Agency to allow it to recover financially.
He did so during the half-hour meeting on the 20th of this month in Hiroshima, Japan, where Lula attended the Group of 7 (G7) summit as a guest, just as Alberto Fernández had done in Germany in 2022. Lula called Argentina’s recovery one of the pillars of Brazil’s international trade and reiterated that he is negotiating aid to Argentina with the New Development Bank, the Brics Development Bank (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa), which is formerly owned by the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
After the trip to Brazil, the Argentine President will travel to the Bolivian city of Yacuiba, where next Thursday, together with his Bolivian counterpart Luis Arce, he will inaugurate the first electricity connection project between the two countries. So far, Argentina and Bolivia have only shared gas connections.
With information from Telam