Uruguayan Foreign Minister Bustillo has embarked on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to negotiate his country’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Mercosur entered a new institutional crisis due to the political decision of Luis Lacalle Pou to deepen his unilateral strategy of closing free trade agreements outside the regional bloc that Uruguay integrates together with Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
A few months ago, Montevideo announced negotiations with China to end a bilateral pact that excludes Mercosur and is now understood to be trying to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership led only by New Zealand and Australia.
Faced with this public information, the governments of Alberto Fernández, Jair Bolsonaro and Mario Benítez created a diplomatic strategy that is unprecedented in Mercosur’s thirty-year history. Through a joint post, posted at the same time (9:00 a.m. in Argentina), they warned Uruguay that they will act with the greatest legal rigor to avoid breaking the structural rules of the regional bloc.
“Given the actions of the Uruguayan government with a view to the individual negotiation of trade agreements with a tariff dimension and taking into account the possible presentation, by the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, of a request for accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ), the National Coordinators of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay before the Mercosur Common Market Group kindly inform the National Coordination of Uruguay that the three countries reserve the right to adopt any measures they deem necessary to protect their interests in legal spheres and trade”, says the joint communique signed by the foreign ministries of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
The reaction of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay is the direct response to the trip that the Uruguayan Foreign Minister, Francisco Bustillo, started in Australia and New Zealand to offer his country’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Agreement. Bustillo will perform this act of full diplomatic symbolism tomorrow in Auckland (New Zealand), because that is where the formal agreement signed by all its members has been filed.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership consists of Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam, representing 13 percent of world GDP and a market of more than 500 million people .
Lacalle Pou believes that Mercosur is a commercial corset for Uruguay and has a roadmap aimed at reaching a series of free trade agreements. He has already started down that path with China and is now proceeding with the Trans-Pacific deal, despite the strict legal restrictions imposed by the regional forum’s current regulations.
The norm of establishing Mercosur is correct: the agreements are made between the four partners and the international counterpart, there are no unilateral actions or diplomatic advances alone. For this reason, it drew attention in Buenos Aires, Brasília and Asunción that Lacalle Pou will advance with the Trans-Pacific Agreement.
There was already a formal protest within Mercosur when Lacalle Pou announced his intentions to sign an agreement with China, but this claim did not discourage the strategy of the Uruguayan head of state.
On the contrary: before Foreign Minister Bustillo’s trip to Australia and New Zealand, Lacalle Pou presented three reports from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economy and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) encouraging Uruguay’s inclusion in the multilateral Trans-Pacific bloc .
Next week, in Montevideo, Lacalle Pou will hand over the Mercosur Pro Tempore Presidency to Alberto Fernández. It will be a complex summit due to the geopolitical differences between the two leaders. The Argentine president is betting on deepening the commercial and political mechanisms of the regional bloc, while his Uruguayan colleague is betting on closing the Free Trade Agreements outside Mercosur.
It is the first time that Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have come together to issue an official warning to Uruguay. Until that moment, secret diplomacy had tried to calm the differences to prevent a public crisis from placing Mercosur close to the institutional abyss.
With the presentation that Bustillo will make tomorrow in New Zealand to add Uruguay to the Trans-Pacific Agreement and today’s official declaration approved by Alberto Fernández, Bolsonaro and Benítez, a new chapter has opened in Mercosur – dramatic and with an end open.
With information from EFE
