Weekly Report - 12 March 2015 (WR-15-10)

Uruguay’s new foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa was received in Buenos Aires by his Argentine peer Héctor Timerman on 5 March. The meeting took place four days after the investiture of Uruguay’s President Tabaré Vázquez. Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández failed to show up for the ceremony.

While President Fernández admittedly faces some political difficulties at home, it would not have been an arduous journey across the River Plate to attend the inauguration, and her no-show could well owe to rancour over Vázquez’s admission in October 2011 (18 months after his first term in office ended) that he had considered war scenarios with Argentina when the dispute over the construction of a pulp mill on the Uruguayan side of the shared River Uruguay reached fever-pitch in 2007.

The Argentine foreign ministry released a statement highlighting the “traditional ties of friendship” between the two countries, but Timerman has helped these ties to spiral downwards in a succession of diatribes in recent years, including threatening to take Uruguay to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague once again over the pulp mill.

Vázquez will not have to spend too much of his second five-year term dealing with Fernández, just the first nine months until she leaves office in December, when it is likely relations with Argentina will become less prickly.

But sensitive issues will remain, such as administration of the River Uruguay and the River Plate and Argentine trade protectionism, which has affected Uruguay directly and stymied any advance in talks between the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the European Union (EU) over a free trade agreement, an interminable soap opera without the drama.