Permanent Secretary of SELA to attend MERCOSUR Summit

Caracas, July 29, 2014.- The Permanent Secretary of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System (SELA), Ambassador Roberto Guarnieri, was invited to participate in the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) Summit, to be held in Caracas on 29 and 30 July.

MERCOSUR is made up by the Argentine Republic, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Republic of Paraguay, the Eastern Republic of Uruguay and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The Plurinational State of Bolivia is in the process of adhesion.

There are also six Associate States to MERCOSUR: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Guyana and Suriname.

During the summit – to be attended by the Heads of State of the member countries and Presidents of other countries – Venezuela will hand over the Presidency of MERCOSUR to Argentina.

According to the Panama Convention establishing SELA in 1975, the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System is a regional organization for consultation, coordination, cooperation and joint economic and social promotion. It is of a permanent nature and is made up by 28 sovereign Latin American and Caribbean States.

One of its objectives is to promote Latin American and Caribbean integration, by using its experience to contribute to strengthen the convergence of integration mechanisms toward common goals and purposes.

During his speech at the plenary session of the Summit, Ambassador Guarnieri said that the Permanent Secretariat of SELA has planned a comprehensive evaluation of the regional integration process, which involves various mechanisms: the Andean Community, CARICOM, MERCOSUR, SICA, ALBA-TCP and the Pacific Alliance, as well as the necessary process for their convergence in a common Latin American and Caribbean economic area.

Such assessment will be submitted in an annual report that will include the status, achievements and difficulties of this process in various areas: international context, institutional changes, trade in goods and services, foreign direct investment, financial and monetary coordination, development and productive integration, physical infrastructure, trade facilitation and the social dimension. The report will also include the evolution of regional cooperation programmes enhancing integration.

The Permanent Secretariat believes that the various subregional integration mechanisms can progressively converge. Achieving such goal is a complex but certainly possible task, for which constraints of all kinds – political, economic, institutional, social and historical ones – should be removed.

The current situation, characterized by interruptions in the effectiveness of the regional economic integration process, requires promoting a favourable environment to overcome such interruptions and to renew discussions about those issues that draw closer the positions of the nations involved, in all the sectors, so as to have a common and global voice. SELA’s mission in the area of integration –as reiterated in several meetings of the Latin American Council– is to facilitate convergence and rapprochement in order to reduce asymmetries among countries and groups of countries.

The objective of the Permanent Secretariat of SELA is to build a common history, that is Latin American and Caribbean integration, in which MERCOSUR plays an important role.