President Alberto Fernández will have in the next summits of the Mercosur and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), which will take place between December and Januarytwo key appointments in his regional projection as head of the second multilateral organization, in addition to his trip to Brazil to attend the inauguration of Inácio Lula da Silvawhich is observed by the Casa Rosada as “excellent news”, which “will promote” the progressive agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Mercosur Summit
Fernández will resume his international activity with his participation in the Summit of Heads of State of Mercosur, to be held in Montevideo on December 5 and 6, in which Uruguay will transfer the rotating presidency of the bloc to Argentina.
The meeting ofand Montevideo will be crossed by a long-standing discussion between the member states of Mercosur, and which marked the last meeting in Asunción (Paraguay): whether or not to make the opening of the South American bloc more flexible towards other markets, and, if so, at what rate and under what conditions.
A few days before the meeting in Montevideo that will host him, the Uruguayan president Luis Lacalle Pou, announced that on December 1, Uruguay will present the letter of adhesion to the Comprehensive and Progressive Treaty of Trans-Pacific Partnershipsomething that is expected to cause sparks both in the preparatory technical and ministerial meetings for the Summit that will begin that same day, when the Mercosur Trade Commission will meet, and in the meeting of the leaders.
The Montevideo meeting will be crossed by a long-standing discussion between the member states, and which marked the last meeting: the advisability or not of making the opening of the South American bloc more flexible towards other markets.
“The Mercosur summit is going to decide what it has to decide”, Presidential spokeswoman Gabriela Cerruti said at a press conference last Thursday, when asked by the Uruguayan target, while denying that the issue was part of the bilateral meeting that Fernández held with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Bali, in the framework of the G-20 Leaders Summit held last week in Indonesia.
Beyond Cerruti’s words, sources from the San Martín Palace confided to Télam that Argentina “will deploy in Uruguay, as it has been doing, an agenda that favors all members of the bloc and that the decisions adopted be by consensus, as established in the founding statute of Mercosur”.
“There are internal tensions that are undeniable, but they develop within the framework of a block that is barely 31 years old and that, despite the pending issues, continues to be the longest-lasting regional integration process” in Latin America, they analyze close to Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero, to later reaffirm that for the Government, Mercosur is the “main instrument of international economic insertion” and, therefore, constitutes a “true State policy”.
The firm decision of the Government of Betting on the South American bloc has its clear motivations: Mercosur’s trade with the rest of the world reached a record level of US$598,000 million during 2021, while extra-zone exports also had a record figure of US$339,000 million for that year, growing by 35% compared to 2020 and 26% compared to 2019.
Lula’s assumption
Fernández’s attendance at the inauguration of the elected president of that country, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, next January 1 in Brasilia marks for the Casa Rosada another event of great relevance in its foreign policy.
It will be the second visit to Brazil in less than two months of the Argentine president, after the trip he made to Sao Paulo on October 31, after confirming the victory, in a ballot, of the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) over the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
From the Argentine Foreign Ministry highlighted the relationship of “friendship” and the “political harmony” that unites both leaders, and they recalled that the president-elect of Brazil has a “personal gratitude” to Alberto Fernández for the visit that “without measuring costs” he made to him in July 2019, even though he was a candidate for President, to the prison of Curitiba.
“Lula’s arrival in Brazil is excellent news for Argentina and for Alberto (Fernández),” the sources told this agency to later assess that the arrival of an “ally, friend and world leader” to the Presidency of the giant The South American “will promote the regional agenda with the values that up to now Alberto had practically only championed” in the region.
Along the same lines, in statements made last Thursday at Casa Rosada, the ambassador in Brasilia, Daniel Scioli, He maintained that “the great objective” indicated by the President and Foreign Minister Cafiero is “to reach an agreement for a deep integration with Brazil for the time to come”.
The Celac Summit
Twenty-three days after Lula’s inauguration, there will be a new key event for the region: the Celac Summit of Heads of State, scheduled for on January 24, in Buenos Aireswhich will have as a central point of its agenda, the election of the country that exercises the Pro Tempore Presidency of the regional integration mechanism in the period 2023.
As Télam was able to learn, although the specific issues to be discussed at that summit have yet to be defined, which will have the exclusive attraction of the presence of the three-time president of Brazil, the advancing in the gradual process of integration of the region“without exclusions and respecting the political, economic, social and cultural diversity of the more than 600 million inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean”, a principle that Fernández has been upholding since the Celac PPT and which specifically means the inclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, countries indicated by Washington.
“That is the spirit with which Celac was born, and that was done by Argentina during its Pro Tempore Presidency this year”, they highlight close to Cafiero, about the imprint of the Argentine president at the head of the regional mechanism, which he aspires to continue presiding next year.
The meeting will continue to advance in the gradual process of integration of the region, “without exclusions and respecting the political, economic, social and cultural diversity of the more than 600 million inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
In the San Martín Palace they trust and evaluate that the important achievements obtained by the Argentine PPT will facilitate the re-election of Fernández as head of Celac.
So far in 2022 The Argentine president brought the Latin American voice and position to different international forums: at the last G7 summit, in Germany, where he denounced the consequences that the war in Ukraine imposes on the southern hemisphere, the energetic demand at the last Summit of the Americas for the end of the blockades and sanctions imposed by Washington on countries in the region (such as Cuba and Venezuela) and his recent interventions at the Paris Forum for Peace, to which he was personally invited by his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron; and at the G-20 Leaders Summit, held in Indonesia.
“Argentina raises its voice for the weakest: it is a deep and constant decision of Alberto Fernández. He did it with Evo Morales saving his life (at the time of the coup in Bolivia), he did it with Lula going to visit him in jail. It does so with Haiti, which is experiencing a humanitarian, political and economic catastrophe and is being made invisible by the real powers of the region,” they said, when defining the regional leadership profile assumed by the head of state.
