MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Presidents Boric and Lacalle hold talks in Santo Domingo

Boric said he had a good meeting with Lacalle and insisted a common Latin American currency would still take quite a while

Presidents Gabriel Boric Font of Chile and Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay held a bilateral on the sides of the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Among the topics discussed was a joint interest in hosting the 2030 football World Cup. In addition to Boric, Lacalle also held a meeting with Spain's King Felipe VI.

“Good meeting with the President of Uruguay Luis Lacalle Pou. We talked about the relevance of integration, trade exchange, strengthening of democracy, and respect for human rights,” Boric posted on Twitter.

He and Lacalle talked about “the relevance of integration, commercial exchange, strengthening of democracy and respect for human rights,” the Chilean leader wrote.

When Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay made official their bid to host the 2030 World Cup, South American Football Confederation President Alejandro Domínguez said he was “convinced” that FIFA had “the obligation to honor the memory of those who organized the first World Cup” in Uruguay in 1930.

During Lacalle's meeting with the Spanish monarch, Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo was also present together with the Spanish Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean Juan Fernández Trigo.

Lacalle Pou, Felipe VI, and Portugal's President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa took part in the presentation of the Ibero-American Program for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, where the round table “Towards a just and inclusive transition in Ibero-America: a firm commitment to leave no one behind” was held.

Regarding the effects of a common currency for various Latin American countries, Boric argued that believing that such an initiative would have a positive impact on the region's economy was “at least naïve” and insisted that such a move would not lead to further integration. It is necessary to advance a lot in “integration,” which “is a very long road, and to think that a single Latin American currency is going to make us integrate per se is at least naive and voluntarist. We have a long way to go in integration before thinking about a single currency,” Boric was quoted as saying.

In August last year, during a visit to Colombia, Boric said he was “available to discuss” the idea of a single currency for Latin America. However, in Santo Domingo, he pointed out that “when we manage to advance more in that direction, we will perhaps be able to have discussions on a single currency, but it seems to me that it is too early to think of something of those characteristics and there is much to advance in integration prior to that.”

“I had the opportunity to go to Europe in 2003, and if I remember correctly, in that year in France, the people with whom I lived -I was there for a couple of months- were using a calculator to change from francs to euros, because they were not yet used to this type of exchange and to this single currency that had just been installed in Europe,” Boric explained. “In order to reach the euro, we had to go through nearly 50 years of integration,” he added.

Earlier this year, Argentina and Brazil put forward the idea of creating a single currency called “Sur” for all of Latin America.