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Buried in 2018 by right-wing governments, the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) will be officially relaunched by President Lula this Tuesday in Brasilia in the presence of a dozen leaders, including Maduro. This type of meeting had not occurred since 2014. Regarding the leadership of the Brazilian president in this initiative, RFI interviewed Cesar Niño, a professor of international relations at La Salle University in Bogotá.
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Since he returned to power in January, Lula has tried to restore Brazil’s leading role on the international scene and is now trying to relaunch cooperation in South America through a new version of Unasur, of which only seven of the 12 founding members remain.
The leaders of Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela and Brazil meet in the Brazilian capital starting this Tuesday to outline what the integration of South America could be. An official Unasur meeting will not take place in Brasilia, but rather exchanges on what could be the future of the bloc’s foreign policy.
With the relaunch of Unsur, the member countries aspire to revive the dream of creating a South American bloc. President Lula has presented this meeting as a “retreat” to think about the future of the region “beyond ideologies and internal crises.”
For César Niño, professor of International Relations at the University of La Salle (Bogotá), the leadership is not only from Brazil, although President Lula is the host, but also from Argentina, since this country “has also taken on a fundamental role”. in the process of “reviving pan-South American sentiments, the idea of the rebirth of the Patria Grande”.
Behind this, the intention is to “operate a kind of integration, not only political, but also cultural, including ideological, with an interesting turn of the left in Latin America,” Niño emphasizes. Although there is a certain “affinity” between the political leaders of the South American left, for this teacher “they are quite different from each other; the Latin American lefts are not homogeneous: Lula’s left and Petro’s are not the same as Maduro’s” . Hence this analyst concludes that “Unasur is more a political forum than a regional integration entity. Latin America has the great difficulty of integration in the strict sense.”
On the intentions of the Brazilian president to lead that bloc, César Niño evokes the role that Brazil plays as “cornerstone, gear, of Latin American politics.” He also recalls that the times he has been president, Lula “sought to integrate Latin America and tried to show himself as the region’s political leader par excellence. The Brazilian president has proposed a kind of Latin American reunification, returning again to what at some point was, from the Brazilian perspective, to observe Latin America as the zone of influence of imperial Brazil”.
