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REPORTS: ARGENTINA |
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ARGENTINA:
Kirchner Would Cast His Lot with Mercosur
and Lula
Marcela
Valente
BUENOS AIRES, (IPS) - South
America's Mercosur trade bloc will receive
a major boost, beyond mere integration in
trade, and at the expense of the
U.S.-promoted FTAA continent-wide trade
area -- as Brazil hopes -- if Néstor
Kirchner wins the second round of
presidential elections in Argentina on May
18.
Kirchner, who heads the polls with a wide
lead over his rival, the
corruption-tainted former president Carlos
Menem (1989-1999), clearly showed his
interest in strengthening political
integration in the Mercosur on his visits
with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva Thursday and President Ricardo
Lagos of Chile -- a Mercosur associate
member -- on Friday.
But if Menem completes his comeback and
makes it to the presidency for the third
time, he will privilege relations with
Washington, as well as the U.S. initiative
for the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the
Americas), creating tension in Argentina's
relations with Brazil.
These are the general conclusions reached
in Argentina by analysts of South
America's integration process as they
evaluate possible future scenarios,
depending on who takes office to replace
caretaker President Eduardo Duhalde on May
25.
''It is clear that on the foreign policy
front, Kirchner is going to cast his lot
with the Mercosur,'' the director of the
Institute of Brazilian Studies in
Argentina, Alberto Ferrari Etcheberry,
told IPS. He added that Menem embodies
''the very negation of a project of
integration with Brazil.''
''Integration is the current answer to the
process of nation- building, and the Menem
administration represented a setback in
that building process. If he were to win,
the setback would only deepen, because his
government would put priority on the FTAA,
the country would fall under the sway of
the United States, and sovereign States
would be replaced by free flows of
capital,'' he said.
The views of each candidate with respect
to this issue were highlighted this week,
when Kirchner met Thursday with Lula in
Brasilia, and received the strong backing
of Brazil's leftist president, and Menem
said his rival's tour to Brazil and Chile
before the runoff vote reflected
''excessive triumphalism.''
Menem, in the meantime, expressed his
interest in moving towards a bilateral
free trade agreement with the United
States, like the one Chile has negotiated
with Washington.
There is no love lost between Lula and
Menem. In his election campaign, Lula, a
former trade unionist, mentioned four
Latin American presidents who
''plundered'' their countries in the
1990s: Brazil's Fernando Collor de Mello,
Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Mexico's Carlos
Salinas, and Menem. ''This must not
continue to happen,'' he stated at the
time.
According to press reports, Lula commented
to Kirchner in a private meeting in
Brasilia that he would be pleased to
attend the candidate's swearing-in
ceremony on May 25, but that if Menem won,
he would have to pretend he was in a full
body cast to avoid travelling to Buenos
Aires.
Referring to the far from warm
relationship with Lula, Menem said ''The
problem arose because during the (2002)
campaign, I supported (then-president
Fernando Henrique) Cardoso'' and his
candidate José Serra.
The Mercosur first emerged while Menem was
in power, and trade between the bloc's
members -- Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and
Paraguay -- boomed during his two terms in
office.
But when sectorial conflicts began to
emerge, it became clear that the free
trade agreement was vulnerable to pressure
from private groups.
The bloc's fragility became even more
evident when it was shaken by the economic
crises that hit the two biggest partners,
starting with the Brazilian debacle, which
occurred in the wake of the 1997 meltdown
in southeast Asia, and led to the crash of
the local currency, the real, in early
1999.
Then came Argentina, where a nearly
four-year recession culminated in the
collapse of the peso, after a decade
during which it was pegged to the dollar.
Ferrari said that in the shape it is in
today, the Mercosur ''is good for
nothing.''
''As Lula said, we must return to the
goals and instruments of the integration
initiative between Argentina and Brazil,
as set out in the bloc's 1989
(foundational) treaty, rather than merely
privilege trade relations at the expense
of political aspects,'' he said.
Kirchner agreed with Lula Thursday
regarding his vision of the role that the
Mercosur and South America as a whole
should assume, ''based on a strategic
political union'' that would strengthen
the region's position in its relations
with the rest of the world.
He also stated that ''solid political
integration is strategic for Argentina.''
The need to ''reactivate'' the Mercosur as
a political accord that strengthens South
America's presence on the international
scene was also the main focus of
Kirchner's meeting with Chilean President
Lagos Friday.
But when it came to the FTAA, Kirchner
admitted that he was in no hurry for it to
go into effect.
The candidate -- who like Menem belongs to
the governing Justicialista (Peronist)
Party -- has announced that if he wins, he
will keep Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna
in his post.
Lavagna, who was the architect of
agreements on trade in cars and capital
goods between Argentina and Brazil in
1987, ''was a key actor in the initial
stage of Argentina's (current) relations
with Brazil, and is one of the few public
persons who has clearly and consistently
defended those ties,'' said Ferrari.
He added that the economy minister would
be Kirchner's ''best choice for foreign
minister.''
''Besides having an in-depth familiarity
with Argentina's ties with Brazil, Lavagna
simultaneously represented this country
for two years in Geneva and Brussels, and
that experience in the World Trade
Organisation and the European Union is not
only essential in and of itself, but for
an integration-focused policy towards
Brazil as well,'' he underlined.
Lavagna, who accompanied Kirchner on the
candidate's visits to Brazil and Chile,
said the main issues on the agenda of
relations between Argentina and Brazil
would not be conflict-ridden sectorial
questions, but industrial policy,
infrastructure and regional financing.
He also referred to the need to speed up
progress towards macroeconomic
coordination in the Mercosur, and, above
all, towards a common currency. He added,
however, that such progress should not be
marked by haste, but by the knowledge that
the process will take time, as Brasilia
has also acknowledged.
''We must abandon the idea that all we
need to do to favour integration is to
lift tariffs, while allowing the market to
determine progress towards that goal,''
Lavagna said in Brazil.
''In the 1990s (the Menem era), that
policy led the Mercosur to the verge of
failure,'' he argued.
With respect to the FTAA, the minister
said he was in favour of postponing the
freeing up of trade in the hemisphere, and
added that 2005 ''is not a hard and fast
deadline'' for the free trade area to come
into being, but a ''guideline.''
The FTAA agreement ''may or may not'' be
ready by that date, he said.
''There are many differences among the 34
countries that would take part in the FTAA''
(all of the nations of the Americas with
the exception of Cuba), remarked Lavagna,
who argued that moving towards free trade
with economies that are ''heavily
protected and subsidised,'' as in the case
of the U.S. agriculture sector, is not an
easy task.
Ferrari concurred, saying that ''a
de-industrialized and basically
agro-exporting Argentina does not have
much to hope for from a free trade
association with the United States, the
country in the world today that probably
subsidises farm production and exports
most heavily.''
Kirchner has poll ratings of around 58
percent, compared to Menem's 22 percent.
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