MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

President of Uruguay criticizes Prosur for “generating another integration with ideological purpose”

“We are the most integrationist region in the world, We have an enormous vocation for integration, but it is the most inefficient: we superpose one process to another and another, until when?” Vazquez

Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez questioned on Thursday the Colombian-Chilean initiative to create a new integration bloc to replace the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and argued that the region has a number of integration processes that collide and they become inefficient.

”Latin America has an enormous amount of regional integration processes: the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celade), the Latin American Integration Association (Aladi). We are the most integrationist region in the world, We have an enormous vocation for integration, but it is the most inefficient: we superpose one process to another and another, until when?“ Vazquez said at a press conference prior to the United Nations High-Level Conference on South-South Cooperation developed in Buenos Aires.

Although he will not participate in the summit of South American leaders for Prosur, according to El Observador, the president announced that Uruguay will attend the meeting as an observer next Friday in Santiago, Chile, where a new South American organization is expected to merge.

The idea, mainly driven by the governments of Chile and Colombia, seeks to replace the already fragmented Unasur. For the summit in Santiago de Chile, all Latin American nations were invited, with the exception of Venezuela.

Vazquez explained that, with the Unasur generation, ”the error“ was made that ”he had a certain political ideology“ and that the creation of another organism such as the mentioned Prosur or another integration process with an ”ideological political” purpose would be Make the same error.

In April 2018, six member countries of UNASUR decided to stop participating in this organization, inoperative since 2017, due to the political polarization generated from the crisis in Venezuela.

Last week Ecuador announced the withdrawing from the block and that it intended to recover the headquarters building located in Quito to deliver it to the Indigenous University of the Andean country.