Weekly Report - 25 April 2006

The US has tried hard to undermine the South American subregional trading blocs with both carrot and stick tactics. Until last week the blocs had been showing a remarkable ability to hold together. All of a sudden, last week the two big blocs, Mercosur and the Andean Community (CAN), seemed on the verge of falling apart, wrecked, ironically enough, by the actions of two of their own members who had been among the most vocal advocates of the building-block approach to regional integration: Argentina and Venezuela.