
Argentine president Cristina Fernandez will be chairing next Tuesday a meeting of the United Nations Security Council that will be addressing the relations of Latam and Caribbean regional and subregional organizations with UN in helping prevent conflicts and restore peace, was announced by the Argentine ambassador Maria Cristina Perceval.

Paraguay and Mexico have made significant advances in reaching a trade agreement in the framework of the Latinamerican Integration Association, ALADI, according to Paraguayan diplomatic sources.

Influential Latin American newspapers have been extremely critical of Brazilian diplomacy in its unsuccessful attempts to ‘subdue Paraguay’, while at the same praising the landlocked country’s dignity in demanding from Mercosur respect and compliance with the rule of the law.

Paraguay’s incoming government foreign policy advisor Eladio Loizaga downplayed Mercosur veiled warning calling for a quick return of the country to the block because ‘Paraguay is landlocked and needs the Parana River and the River Plate to reach the sea’.

Paraguayan president Federico Franco replied to his Uruguayan peer Jose Mujica ironic remarks saying that ‘evidently he’s good at geography; I guess he passed with the highest grades’ since he is aware that Paraguay is a landlocked ‘Mediterranean’ country.

President Rafael Correa said that the determining factor for Ecuador to join as full member of Mercosur or the Alliance of the Pacific is the ‘flexibility’ granted in certain admission conditions, taking into account the fact that Ecuador does not have a national currency.

Uruguayan president Jose Mujica was ironic about the conditions Paraguayan president elect Horacio Cartes demanded for his country’s return to Mercosur, but also in a veiled message called for ‘intelligence and pragmatism’ recalling that Paraguay is a landlocked country.

Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) received on Wednesday the National Order Award of Merit, ‘Don Jose Falcon’ from the government of Paraguay.

The Organization of American States Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza said on Wednesday that Paraguay should return to Mercosur because “it’s not good to have exclusions in South America”, but insisted that the solution to the problem is in the hands of the ‘protagonists’ and not in president elect Horacio Cartes.

Brazil wants to change the way Mercosur negotiates trade agreements with the European Union, EU, so as to definitively advance with the ongoing discussions that were started in 1995, but still have to see concrete results, according to Brazilian official trade and diplomatic sources.