Uruguay's deputy foreign minister Jose Luis Cancela said that if Uruguay had not complied with the other Mercosur three founding members' joint declaration ignoring Venezuela's presidency and demanding it complies with the group's legislation and treaties, Mercosur would have been launched into a period of full paralysis.
If beef is not included, there won't be any agreement, said Uruguay's foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa in anticipation of next week's meeting of European Union and Mercosur coordinators to adjust the list of goods and services the two blocks will formally exchange in mid October, the first formal meeting of its kind in fourteen years.
Uruguay plans to build a major terminal for the fishing industry, with sufficient freezing capacity, in the Capurro Park, approximately a mile to the west from the current mooring facilities in the Montevideo bay port.
A delegation of Uruguayan tourism and port authorities together with the country's ambassador in Argentina, Hector Lescano held a meeting in Buenos Aires with their Argentine peers to address bilateral cooperation in boosting the cruise industry on both sides of the River Plate.
A former Guantanamo Bay inmate who was resettled in Uruguay and then arrested in Venezuela after going missing has been sent back to Uruguay, officials announced in Montevideo. Syrian Jihad Diyab, 45, who was resettled in Uruguay as a refugee in 2014 -- was jailed at the headquarters of the Venezuelan secret police after going off the radar in Uruguay then traveling to Venezuela, apparently evading border control.
More than 300 wild reindeer were recently killed by lightning at a Norwegian national park, officials say. The Norwegian Environment Agency has released haunting images of reindeer—including 70 calves—that seemingly fell over where they stood in the grasses of Hardangervidda, the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe.
The fracture in Mercosur was candidly revealed by Uruguay's foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa during an agro-business conference of cooperatives in Montevideo when he received a phone call from his Venezuelan peer Delcy Rodríguez.
Argentina considers that Uruguay created a vacuum in Mercosur when it unilaterally adopted the decision to devolve the block's presidency, and creating an unprecedented situation. Since then Mercosur has been involved in a serious controversy over the transfer of the presidency to Venezuela, which has strongly discredited the South American block.
Brazil summoned Uruguay's ambassador on Tuesday after the neighboring country's foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa accused Brazil of trying to buy its vote to block Venezuela from taking the rotating presidency of the Mercosur trade bloc.
The coordinators of Mercosur founding members will decide next 23 August at a meeting in Montevideo on the legal measures to be applied on Venezuela, which self proclaimed itself the presidency of the group and is also questioned for not complying with the rules and regulations to be incorporated to the group. In that case Venezuela could lose its full member status.