Written by Alex Main
Thursday, 20 May 2010
Earlier this month, as the
US loudly complained about Venezuela’s decision to
purchase arms from Russia, South America’s ministers of defense came together
in Guayaquil, Ecuador and put the finishing touches on an agreement to develop common mechanisms of
transparency in defense policy and spending. The agreement, which also calls
for the creation of a multilateral Center for Strategic Defense Studies, is the most recent
example of the growing effectiveness of the Union of South American Nations
(Spanish acronym UNASUR) as a forum for addressing the most urgent and
sensitive issues on the regional agenda. Though the group remains unknown to
most of the US public - and is rarely referred to by US policy makers - it has,
in the space of a few years, emerged as one of the Western Hemisphere’s leading
multilateral bodies and, in the process, is rapidly undermining the regional
clout of the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS).
UNASUR first began to take
form in 2004 when South American leaders signed theCusco Declaration that committed their governments to
creating “a politically, socially, economically, environmentally and
infrastructurally integrated South American area.” Despite the diverging
political agendas of the region’s governments, the leaders agreed on
prioritizing the group’s role as a geopolitical actor or, in the words of the
declaration, pursuing “concerted and coordinated political and diplomatic
efforts that will strengthen the region as a differentiated and dynamic factor
in its foreign relations.”
In May 2008 UNASUR was
officially established with the signing of a constitutive treaty in Brasilia. In September of the
same year the group achieved its first diplomatic milestone when it successfully defused South
America’s most serious political crisis of the last five years: the attempted
violent destabilization of Evo Morales’ government in Bolivia. President
Michele Bachelet of Chile, the pro-tempore president of UNASUR, convened an
emergency meeting of South American heads of state in Santiago that quickly
issued a unanimous statement strongly condemning the attacks against Bolivian
democracy and announcing the creation of a commission of “support and
assistance” to the Bolivian government. Soon afterwards, Bolivia’s opposition
groups abandoned their violent tactics and agreed to enter negotiations with
the Morales government.
Though the US administration
has been actively promoting the OAS as a defender of democratic stability in
the hemisphere, that organization played no role at all in the peaceful
resolution of the 2008 Bolivian crisis, due no doubt in part to the US’ambivalent position towards the opposition’s
destabilization campaign. In the nearly two years that have elapsed since
UNASUR’s successful diplomatic intervention in Bolivia, the group has continued
to demonstrate its ability to take on the region’s thorniest issues, independently
of the OAS and Washington.
[...]
