Brazil & Southern Cone - September 2007 (ISSN 1471-4431

A renewed diplomatic drive by Chile appears to have dispelled the tension recently built up with Peru over their maritime boundary dispute [SC-07-08]. President Michelle Bachelet has opened new avenues of cooperation by announcing her support for an enhanced version of an initiative her Peruvian peer, Alan Garcí­a, had been claiming as his own: the so-called 'Pacific Arc' integration scheme. At the same time Chile has continued to press ahead with its rapprochement with Bolivia, with special attention to cooperation in the military arena.

On 31 August President Michelle Bachelet signalled the path Chile had chosen to take in order to break the ice with Peru. She said that she had agreed with Garcí­a to leave the maritime dispute off the agenda at the meeting scheduled to take place on the sidelines of the Apec summit in Sydney (8-9 September). The reason she gave was a restatement of Chile's position -that there is no issue pending with Peru, since the maritime boundary was established by treaty back in the 1950s. 

The Peruvian government, for its part, said that the issue had been left off the agenda because "it is already heading towards The Hague, and this process has dynamics of its own." This exchange was formulaic, not hostile. Bachelet ordered red-carpet treatment for Garcí­a during his brief stopover in Santiago, assigning a senior minister to accompany him for the duration.

Peruvian foreign minister José Antonio Garcí­a Belaúnde fulfilled his role by insisting on keeping secret his 3 September briefing of the congressional foreign relations committee regarding the strategy which the Garcí­a administration had adopted to deal with the maritime dispute with Chile. The only aspect of the strategy which he made public was the government's decision not to sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos/Convemar) because "it is neither indispensable nor detrimental" to the suit Peru intends to bring against Chile before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

The Pacific Arc initiative
In Sydney the two presidents announced their joint commitment to what was portrayed as a new integration initiative, the Arco del Pací­fico (Pacific Arc). This was billed, in 2006, as an impromptu proposal to form a Frente del Pací­fico (Pacific Front) with the "pro-market, pro-investment"- and implicitly anti-Chávez - countries of Latin America's Pacific seaboard: Peru, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

In its newer format, the ostensibly informal Arco del Pací­fico fostered two successive forums of trade ministers (January 2007 in Santiago de Cali, Colombia, August 2007 in Lima) from Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Central America. By the time it reached Sydney the original idea had clearly grown. Bachelet emerged from her meeting with Garcí­a stating, "We have had a conversation, in line with [an earlier] one held with President [Felipe] Calderón, of a true initiative of the Pacific, in which several countries are working together to develop in a coordinated fashion, their economic and social policies." She said this initiative "includes other countries that are looking towards the Pacific [for which] greater integration would provide us with better responses and better solutions."

Thawing defence relations
On 6 September Peruvian defence minister Allan Wagner visited the field hospital installed by the Chilean government in Ica, following the devastating 15 August earthquake. He was accompanied by Chilean defence minister, José Goñi. Following the visit Wagner announced that before the years end -possibly in November- the two countries would resume the '2+2' meetings 

The last '2+2' meeting (more formally known as the permanent commission of political consultation and coordination), which brings together the foreign affairs and defence ministers, was held after a lengthy hiatus during the tail-end of the Toledo administration (2001-06), in October last year in Santiago. They were later discontinued as a result of the irritation caused in Santiago by Peru's claims to its maritime boundary.

A tentative agenda for the forthcoming meeting is already starting to take shape. One of the issues they will address is progress towards the standardisation of defence spending disclosure, a matter held over from previous encounters. Also included will be confidence-building measures arising from initiatives Chile has shown itself willing to pursue. 

The first of these, which will be the motive of a preparatory meeting in the Chilean city of Arica, is the de-mining of the border area. The second, an offshoot of the aid provided by Chile after the recent earthquake, is the possibility of future cooperation on responding to natural disasters, likely to include training of Peruvian military personnel in Chile. This area will also be examined in a preparatory meeting, possibly in Ica.

The third is the possibility of creating a bilateral peacekeeping force, along the lines of the one set up by Chile and Argentina, which has proven an effective tool to consolidate the confidence-building measures that have contributed to ending one of the longest-lasting interstate rivalries in South America. The big difference between the two situations is that the Chilean-Argentine initiative came after a major effort by Argentine president Carlos Menem (1989-99) to settle pending territorial disputes with Chile. Chile and Peru would be starting at the other end, having placed their current dispute over maritime boundaries on hold in order to pursue cooperation in other areas - a strategy used by Argentina under Menem to resume relations with Britain while the dispute over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands remained unsolved.

While older, the question of standardising the official disclosure of defence spending has been made highly topical by Peru's recent announcement reagrding a defence procurement package which, despite official protestations to the contrary, is clearly designed as a response to the public perception that Peru has been left behind by Chile's 'rearmament'.

Bolivia
The Bachelet government has also been pressing ahead with its rapprochement with Bolivia. On 2 September, Chilean defence minister José Goñi dropped in on his Bolivian peer, Walker San Miguel, on his way to a regional meeting of defence ministers in Haiti. The meeting, though brief, covered much ground. It reviewed projects such as the destruction of antipersonnel and antitank mines laid by Chile along its border with Bolivia, and the prospect of sending Bolivian soldiers to Santiago for special training in de-mining skills. They also discussed broader cooperation in the area of military training, exchanges of students and faculty between military academies, and training of Bolivian personnel in responses to natural disasters. Goñi also suggested that both governments should be allowed to appoint 'police attachés' to their consular representations.

By the following day San Miguel was announcing that Bolivia and Chile were moving fast towards a "total thaw" of their diplomatic relations, nowadays limited to the consular level. In an interview published by the Chilean newspaper La Segunda, he said that the issue of Bolivia's access to the Pacific was being kept "for now, at the bilateral level", adding, "In Chile, Bolivia and America as a whole we are talking nowadays about far more daring integration processes and ceasing to be separated by artificial borders." This may not be exactly what the Chileans have in mind, but they have kept up the momentum.

On 5 September, at the end of a two-day meeting in La Paz, the director of the South America department at Chile's foreign ministry, Juan Pablo Lira, and Bolivia's deputy foreign minister, Hugo Fernández, announced that both countries had agreed to cooperate in their antidrugs efforts along the common border. Chile offered to provide technical assistance in the area of prevention of drug addiction.

The diplomatic effort did not appear to be affected by a political sideshow that had been unfolding as the most recent visits to Bolivia were taking place. On 2 September the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio published a report revealing that between 1996 and 1997 the government of President Eduardo Frei-Ruiz Tagle had been negotiating secretly with that of Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. On the table was a Chilean offer to incorporate the port of Iquique to the free transit régime, providing Bolivia with another outlet to the Pacific, complete with port facilities under Bolivian control. The only thing lacking was what Bolivia has always been demanding: sovereignty over the outlet.

The Chilean opposition in congress promptly asked the government to report on whether there were secret negotiations presently underway. The motion did not prosper, but it did lead to the further revelation that there had been secret rounds of negotiations during the Lagos administration (2000-2006) with the second Sánchez de Lozada administration (2002-03), in which Bolivia was offered port facilities at Patillo to ship its gas to Mexico and the US.

• Fujimori 
  On 21 September the Chilean supreme court ruled, unanimously, that a former Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori, should be extradited to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges. International human rights organisations hailed the Chilean supreme court's decision as an important step toward ending impunity in Latin America: Human Rights Watch, for instance, said that this was the first time a supreme court had agreed to return a former head of state to his home country.
  
• Coup's anniversary 
  Some 5,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Santiago on 9 September for the first anniversary of the 1973 coup since the death of dictator Augusto Pinochet. They were prevented from marching past the presidential palace by the police. There were violent clashes in the suburbs of Santiago on 11 September, the actual day of the coup. Days later retired officials from the armed forces who served under Pinochet have announced the formation of a new political party with which they plan to contest future elections, the Partido Militar Metropolitano. 
  
• Bachelet's low rating
  A opinion poll, by Adimark Gfk, found that only 39.1% of the people approved of President Michelle Bachelet, the lowest level ever. Her disapproval rating was steady at 42.7%. Bachelet's failure to stem her growing unpopularity is starting to alarm her followers, as ambitious politicians from the centre-left Concertación coalition fear that her shortcomings could cost them the next election in 2009.