MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Former Uruguayan president favours eliminating Mercosur parliament

Lacalle says Parlasur lacks “meaning and purpose”

Former Uruguayan president and the leading presidential hopeful of the main opposition party Luis Alberto Lacalle said that the Mercosur Parliament, Parlasur, lacks all meaning and purpose and proposed its dissolution, in an interview published Sunday in the Montevideo press.

“Parlasur must disappear” underlined Lacalle in a long list of questionings of the current government’s foreign policy.

“One of the worst mistakes of this government was to display foreign policy according to ideological affinities. Whether Argentina is ruled by the Peronists or the Radicales, I don’t care; what matters are my country’s interests”, he underlined.

Lacalle was president from 1990 to 1995 and has been a tenacious critic of the initial (ideological) alignment of the government of President Vázquez with the administration of Argentine president Nestor Kirchner which ended in a most serious diplomatic confrontation over the building of a pulp mill, which later extended to the political, trade and financial fields.

The former president added that Uruguay committed the huge mistake of joining the Mercosur Parliament “which is useless and did not even address the issue of the blocked bridges (because of the pulp mill dispute)”.

Argentine pickets protesting the alleged contamination of the pulp mill on the Uruguayan side of a border river have been blocking for three years a bridge interrupting all trade and movements.

Made up of 90 members from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, Parlasur was created in December 2006 in Brasilia at a time when the junior members (Paraguay, Uruguay) of the common trade area were complaining against the persistent asymmetries with the larger economies (Brazil, Argentina) and the ongoing difficulties to have access with their produce to those markets.

Since then the situation, partly because of the world recession has worsened particularly from the Argentine side which demands exporters must request “licence imports” which have a 90 day discretionary processing period.

Lacalle during his tenure in 1991 was one of the founding signatories of the Mercosur treaty in Asunción, Paraguay. However he has always opposed the group’s decisions limiting country members’ autonomy.