It may seem unusual, but it is undoubtedly unprecedented. Due to the CGT strike and the lack of use of private flights, the chancellor Diana Mondino This afternoon I was traveling in Paraguay, half by plane, half by car, by landand from Formosa. The return will be the same, but in reverse order and then we will have to stay until Thursday the 25th in Asunción.
In Paraguay the agenda has multiple purposes. She formally awaits the meeting – the first for her as Javier Milei’s minister – of the foreign ministers of five Mercosur countries: that of Paraguay, Ruben Ramirez, guest of the presidency that begins there; that of Brazil, Mauro Vieira, which controls a large part of the negotiations; that of Uruguay, Omar Paganini; AND Celinda Sosa from Bolivia, a country that has just joined the bloc as a full member.
Mondino travels with the undersecretary of Latin American affairs, the ambassador Mariano Vergaraand with the director of Mercosur of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rossana Sanchez.
The logistical difficulty with the lack of flights is such Mondino will take a commercial plane to Formosa this afternoon. And although the Paraguayans offered to help them with a plane, the chancellor decided to travel austerely by vehicle to the nearby capital. Due to the strike and the lack of flights, on Thursday he will return by land to Formosa and from there to Buenos Aires.
regional summit
The meeting in Paraguay has dual purpose. On one side revoke the free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union, which fell in December when Alberto Fernández’s government said it would not sign at this stage. There were always objections on both sides, including the strong French lobby against any agricultural concessions.
In the meantime, The Milei government wants to rush to sign this and other agreements. Ambassador Marcelo Cima, Secretary of International Trade and National Coordination of International Negotiations, is in Brasilia this Tuesday with the mission of relaunching the text negotiated for December and dropped; and the idea they have is to soon have something ready to bring him and Mondino something new on a trip to Brussels, which has no date yet but they want it for half the year.
From you Mondino and Vergara also face negotiations with the government of Santiago Peña on the collection of tolls on the Santa Fe Waterway to the north. It was established by the Fernandez government, and since January 2023 it has been charged in dollars: Paraguayans reject it. There has been a strong escalation in this sense. The idea of the new Argentine government is to continue charging but lower the price.
As for Uruguay, there is also another negotiation so that the new Argentine government – “which has the best will”, they say here – accepts a long Uruguayan request to be able to extend the dredging of the access channel to the port of Montevideo from 13 to 14 metres, which the neighbors want to transform into a point of strong international influence and which obviously competes with Buenos Aires.
Mondino and the Argentine delegation are also waiting demonstration against at the Argentine embassy in Asunción for workers. It will be the same day as the strike and, they say, it is promoted by the opposition in Argentina.
The chancellor has never met her colleagues from the region as minister, except the Brazilian Vieira, to whom she delivered a letter from Milei to Lula inviting him to take office on 10 December. Subsequently she received him mainly in Buenos Aires. Lula and Milei never spoke after the former openly supported Sergio Massa and the latter called him a “poisoned socialist”.
Source: Clarin
