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Unasur Pledges to Isolate Governments From Coups, Fight Drug Trafficking
Presidents from the Union of South American Nations, known as Unasur, agreed to coordinate efforts to fight drug trafficking and to isolate governments that emerge from coups, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa said.
Unasur members met today during the fourth summit in Georgetown, Guyana, where Correa passed on the temporary presidency to that country’s President, Bharrat Jagdeo. The bloc didn’t propose names for a new secretary general to replace Nestor Kirchner, Argentina’s former president who died last month.
The 12-nation Unasur, formed two years ago in a bid to bolster regional integration, adopted a charter today that calls for sanctions on non-democratic regimes. The charter is more substantial than a similar protocol adopted by the Organization of American States, Correa told reporters in Georgetown.
“We didn’t limit ourselves to rhetoric,” Correa said. “The main difference is not in the writing of the document, it is in the credibility.”
Unasur resolved a political dispute between Colombia and Venezuela under Kirchner’s leadership and took emergency steps to show support for Ecuador’s President after protests by police and members of the military in September left eight dead and 274 wounded in what Correa called a coup attempt.
Unasur’s democratic charter will establish “concrete sanctions” in the case of a coup against a member country, including the closing of borders, Correa said.
Organized Crime
The group also created a security council to try and coordinate the cross-border fight against organized crime in the region, and called on the U.S. to help in tackling demand for drugs.
The lower house of Uruguay’s Congress ratified the Unasur founding treaty yesterday, and the Senate is scheduled to vote on Nov. 30. Uruguay’s approval would give the bloc a valid legal framework. The treaty, signed by the presidents in 2008, needs to be ratified by the legislatures of 9 of the 12 countries to take effect.
Unasur’s next leader will be instrumental in shaping the future of the group, which is attempting to play a role akin to the OAS without the involvement of the U.S., Chris Sabatini, senior policy director at the Council of the Americas in New York, said.
“It’s really only been, so far, a series of summits and declarations driven by personalities,” Sabatini said in a phone interview from New York on Nov. 24. “Clearly, Unasur has aspirations to become a regional grouping free of the United States that does what the OAS purports to do, but does it better. It has to have some sort of life between summits.”
New Secretary
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that the South American presidents agreed to meet again in December, in Mar de Plata, Argentina, to propose names for the next secretary general.
Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, who steps down on Dec. 31 following the election of his former Cabinet chief, Dilma Rousseff, is not interested in heading Unasur, his spokesman, Marcelo Baumbach, said on Nov. 23.
Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, former Uruguay President Tabare Vazquez and former Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Enrique Taiana are also potential candidates to replace Kirchner, Sabatini said.
Kirchner, who became secretary general of Unasur in May, successfully mediated talks two months later to restore diplomatic ties between Colombia and Venezuela. On Oct. 1 the presidents of Unasur member states called an emergency meeting in Buenos Aires the day after the upheaval in Ecuador.
Kirchner’s Success
Kirchner’s mediation in mending relations between Chavez and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was a “political miracle,” Lula said today, and shows that the group has matured so that countries with ideological differences can work together.
“We’ve learned to respect each other and live democratically in diversity,” Lula said. “Who would have thought five months ago that Santos and Chavez could have such harmonious relations? It’s a political miracle.”
Chavez froze ties with former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe last year in part due to an agreement to allow U.S. troops access to military bases to combat drug trafficking that Chavez said was a threat to Venezuelan sovereignty.
The Venezuelan president said today that he hasn’t discussed the presence of U.S. troops at bases with Santos and that the relations between the two nations have been “demilitarized.”
Ecuador’s Correa and Colombia’s Santos also announced at the summit that the two countries had fully reestablished diplomatic ties that were severed in March 2008.
With assistance from Helen Murphy in Bogota. Editors: Harry Maurer, Robin Stringer
To contact the reporter on this story: Fabiola Moura in Georgetown at fdemoura@bloomberg.net or Daniel Cancel in Caracas at dcancel@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at jgoodman19@bloomberg.net
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