Chile and Latin America in a Globalized World

5. Five Dialogues

19 5 Five Dialogues In terms of our foreign policy, I would like to mention five dialogues taking place within the hemisphere. One dialogue refers to the Hispanic-American world. We have had this recent summit in Salamanca, Spain, a couple of months ago that was related to the cultural and historical roots we share: we belong with Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, and share a common heritage. So, that is part of our scheme of integration: a forum like the “Hispanic American Summit” that has just created a permanent secretariat, with Enrique Iglesias, a very well-known and respected Latin American citizen, leading this secretariat towards a new and much more vigorous scheme of integration, dealing more with 20 Ignacio Walker culture and historical roots rather than anything else. The second dialogue is related to the Americas, with 34 countries belonging to it, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. There are two issues here: the OAS (Organization of American States), which gathers all those 34 states (all except for Cuba), and the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas). We must admit that the OAS has been a declining organization for many years — perhaps even decades — and is in need of a new leadership. An encouraging recent development is that a couple of months ago we elected Jose Miguel Insulza as the new Secretary General of the organization. He is Chilean, and a very wellknown and respected leader in the region, and he is providing the leadership that is needed in the Americas to deal with very sensitive political issues. How is it possible, for example, that Haiti was not dealt with in the OAS? It was taken to the Security Council of the United Nations, but not to the OAS. So we lack a kind of forum on the Americas to deal with political, economic, and social issues. I think the Organization of American States and the leadership of Insulza are providing a kind of new impulse aimed at 21 redressing the declining process of the organization in the region. The second issue is, of course, that of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. We were in Mar del Plata, in Argentina, two or three months ago, in the Summit of the Americas trying to deal with this issue: how to be in tune with the globalized world and not to stay behind while other regions of the world are opening up, are liberalizing, are integrating into the world economy. Unfortunately, there is a strong ideological prejudice in Latin America, which makes it difficult to go faster in terms of a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and it was a very divisive issue in this Summit of Mar del Plata in Argentina. A third dialogue refers to “Latin America and the Caribbean” itself, which is another reality, another entity. In this case we have the Rio Group. The Rio Group is a forum in which Latin American and Caribbean countries gather to discuss issues like Haiti, for example, which is very similar to many of the things we are trying to pursue in the region. But this Rio Group has failed to meet the expectations. A fourth dialogue, one which is perhaps Five Dialogues 22 Ignacio Walker more promising, at least in terms of its potential, is South America. South America is also a geographic, political, and economic unit to which we belong. We have created in Cusco, in Perú, in November 2004, the “South American Community of Nations”. The model is that of the European Union, although we are far from having accomplished at least a fraction of what has already been achieved by the Europeans. The South American Community of Nations should lead to at some point, and that is our aim, some kind of South American Union that includes 12 countries: four from Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay), six from the Andean Community (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela), plus Chile, and Guyana and Suriname. At this level and within the context of this new initiative, we are trying to undertake some steps to account for the systematic failures of Mercosur and the Andean Community. Mercosur was created in 1991 with the view of becoming a customs union, with a common external tariff barrier, which has not yet taken place due to the list of “exceptions” of goods, and the variety of tariffs that are in place, going from 0...