Marta Lucía Ramírez, Colombian Vice President and Chancellor, who will step down on August 7, thinks Latin American integration is not progressing because there is a “mediocre” vision and a lack of political will to push it forward.
“What was true was that we didn’t have a real vision of integration, what we had, which I regret, was a very mediocre vision of integration,” Ramírez told Agência Efe this Thursday.
According to him, “different governments of all countries” attend “many presidential and sometimes ministerial meetings”, but “there is no real political will to integrate”.
“Every time we talk about trade liberalization, lifting tariffs, lifting restrictions, and deep integration, we see a lot of limitations and a lot of myths,” he thought.
Ramírez, who was Minister of Commerce under Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002), criticized that “even in terms of removing tariffs, we see the number of restrictions that some Latin American countries have imposed on other countries”.
In other cases, they impose mandatory visas on travelers and “stop and extradite travelers upon arrival in that country when they don’t issue a visa,” he said.
“If there really is a will to integrate, we must have a single mechanism that will allow the free movement of people, commerce, goods, capital, to integrate them, to do something similar to the European Union. Latin America is very strong, but Latin America individually, each country on its own. weak on the international stage,” he said.
POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE.
The vice president and chancellor added that “whether the governments in power are from the left or the right, this continent must always fight for that (integration)”.
In this context, after seeing the governments of Chile and Colombia, the two countries pioneering this mechanism, shift from the right to the left, he expressed his desire to continue the Forum for the Progress and Development of South America (Prosul).
Prosur was founded in 2019 by then-Chilean President Sebastián Piñera and his Colombian counterpart, Iván Duque, as an alternative to the South American League of Nations (Unasur), which they view as overly “bureaucratic and ideological”.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced on April 3 his decision to suspend his country’s participation in this mechanism, and it is not yet clear how the next Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, who is in line with his Chilean counterpart and will take over in ten days, will react. As Duke’s successor.
“I hope that Prosur will not disappear, I hope that complementarity between vehicles and between mechanisms of articulation and integration can be achieved in our region,” said the Colombian Chancellor.
Ramírez also said that he wants “all countries, governments, presidents to go beyond the short-term character of their mandate and think with a great statesman’s vision of how we can have a strong and integrated Latin America.” It would be very powerful if we had only one mechanism, or two complementary mechanisms.”
Evaluating what he couldn’t do during his tenure as vice president of four years and a foreign minister for a little over a year, Ramírez said, “I wish I had more time to do much more with Latin America, first of all, make the region, for example, a “pantry of processed food for many countries of the world”. We have produced a major integrative project based on regional value chains.
“I find it completely absurd that a subcontinent so rich in natural resources, so rich in productive capacity should have such extreme poverty, such high poverty and so much citizen dissatisfaction,” he complained.
source: Noticias
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