Brazil & Southern Cone - September 2009 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Lula’s optimistic claims for Unasur

The 28 August extraordinary presidential summit of the 12-member Union of South American Nations (Unasur) in Bariloche, Argentina to discuss a controversial new 10-year Colombia-US agreement on shared military bases was a good example of how not to conduct such a meeting. The boisterious megaphone diplomacy that preceeded it, led by the main protagonists, Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez (along with his regional leftwing allies), was an equally good example of the worst aspects of  the so-called presidential ‘superdiplomacy’ that tends to dominate in Latin America’s numerous, overlapping and largely ineffectual multilateral forums.  President Lula da Silva’s subsequent assertions that South America had taken another important step towards regional integration at Bariloche didn’t hold too much water. Moreover, the summit raised important questions about the limits of Lula’s own strategic objectives for Brazil in the region as he nears the end of his second term.