MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Unasur summit on Haiti could help ease regional tensions

Colombia’s Uribe who has strained relations with Ecuador and Venezuela has confirmed attendance.

Union of South American Nations, Unasur, leaders meet Tuesday in Quito, Ecuador to discuss the continent’s response to the crisis in earthquake devastated Haiti. The extraordinary summit’s initiative was sponsored by Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa following his visit to Haiti where he met with President René Preval.

According to Ecuador’s Foreign Affairs ministry six presidents, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, Peru’s Alan García, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, Haiti’s René Preval and Bolivia’s Vice-president Alvaro García Linares have confirmed attendance. Delegations from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Surinam and the Secretary General from the Organization of American States José Miguel Insulza will also be present.

Although the meeting will be discussing humanitarian aid to Haiti and long term assistance in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, several of the leaders announced have pending business, which according to analysts could be addressed on the sidelines of the summit.

Colombian President Uribe will attend in his first visit to Ecuador since a 2008 diplomatic break after he ordered the bombing of a rebel camp on Ecuador's side of the border. The raid prompted the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela to temporarily increase troops on their frontiers with Colombia, which has received billions of dollars in US aid aimed at fighting cocaine-funded Marxist guerrillas.

President Hugo Chavez will also be at the meeting. He has clamped down on Venezuela's 7 billion US dollars annual trade with Colombia over Uribe's close military ties with Washington and the recent signing of an agreement for US troops to be stationed in seven Colombian bases.

The last event that both Chavez and Uribe attended was the UNASUR summit in Bariloche, Argentina last August.

Colombia and Ecuador have moved to repair relations in recent months but large political differences remain.

“Uribe's trip to Quito ratifies that cooperation is improving between Colombia and Ecuador,” said Mauricio Romero, a political analyst at Bogota's Javeriana University. “By how much remains to be seen”, but ”Haiti could be a unifying issue for the continent“ he said.
Paraguayan president Lugo the first to arrive in Quito said he expected the Tuesday meeting to be historic “since we all have been summoned to help, to materialize solidarity with the suffering people from Haiti”.

“As South Americans we want no country in the continent or the world to feel isolated, or suffering, as is now happening in the sister republic of Haiti”, he added.

Lugo pointed out that Unasur must become “a great space of solidarity” and called for the creation of a standing “South American Solidarity Brigade” to help extreme situations such as in Haiti.

Meantime the Bolivian government will offer to channel the aid to Haiti given by Unasur during the extraordinary meeting in Quito.
According to La Razon daily, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia told state press that his country will make that proposal, supported and assumed by other governments of the region.

”The aid to Haiti must be channelled through State institutions because power should be centralized and not fragmentized and as it is now,” noted Garcia.

Most South American countries have been linked to the Haiti situation from before the quake. Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia make up the back bone of the major United Nations pacifying effort in the poorest country in Latinamerica.