The meeting convened and led by President Lula, which takes place in Brazil, where South American presidents meet, is an unbeatable space to remember the high price we paid in Latin America for freezing Unasur during these years.
Never before have we needed political dialogue and integration so much as we do now. We must resume without further delay regionalization from the South with the same spirit and dynamism that gave birth to the most complex process of integration achieved in this part of the world that was and must return to the South American bloc.
After crossing the desert of the pandemic, without integration of Latin America and the Caribbean, the region confirmed that there is no better way to overcome its crises than plural dialogue, sustained and supported by a multilateral institutionality away from ideological fundamentalisms such as the Union of South American Nations (Unasur).
The outlook is encouraging: progressive governments are focused on building the region through consensus for the future, far from ideological bets, to face challenges such as post-pandemic management, climate change and the collateral impact of the war in Ukraine and Russia. That is why we show today, in Brazil, the real opportunity to relaunch the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean by giving life to a new Unasur.
Latin America today needs the collective space of Unasur to agree on public policies that cannot be postponed in areas such as health, education, defense, infrastructure, climate change and citizenship, achieving concrete results obtained in different fields. But even more, it needs to bring people into the integration process: it must invite peasants, workers, entrepreneurs and academics: it cannot continue to be a meeting place between disconnected elites.
Unasur must be the answer to the needs of the South American citizen, the place where regional social policies are generated in favor of the most basic needs of people, such as human mobility with a focus on regional citizenship, a South American bank of drug prices to make treatments less expensive, or vaccination programs on a regional scale, among others.
For example, during the years of the pandemic, the region paid dearly for not having an institutional space where the 12 ministers of Health who could have consolidated orders for vaccines and medicines to face the health protectionism of the producing countries had a seat. This task would have been fulfilled very well and effectively by the South American Health Council and the South American Institute of Government in Health (ISAGS) based on their epidemiological experience in the campaigns against the chikungunya virus and human papilloma.
This rebirth of Unasur must be carried out in three gravitational axes: a new agenda for integration, the renewal of its institutionality, a convergence that brings closer the efforts that different subregional integration organizations are making on several fronts.
The new agenda for integration
It is necessary to update existing sectoral agendas such as food security, the ecological transition and migration towards clean energies, the development of artificial intelligence and the search for new and more effective forms of multilateralism that move us away from the hegemonic polarizations that threaten to destroy planetary coexistence.
We have to work on what has been built and Unasur already has instances such as the South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (Cosiplan) that inherited the Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA). In this logic, it should maintain the historical support of the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to assume the challenge of improving the mobility of people, goods and services in the region through the construction of roads, electricity generators, railways, watersheds, connectivity cables and ports whose need and viability is based on studies and portfolios.
Renewing institutions
The future and viability of Unasur depend on a reform of its constitutive treaty to empower the General Secretariat, make the rules on majorities more flexible and expand the possibilities of access for other Latin American countries.
It is necessary to change the method of decision-making, consensus has paralyzed the operation of Unasur, we must include a new system of simple majority rules for operational issues and maintain unity for terminal decisions such as the admission or suspension of members. If the path of the expansion of Unasur is chosen as a way to achieve Latin American reintegration, there must be a flexibility in the two requirements so that other countries in the region can access the organization as permanent observers and, later, as members.
The new institutional design should include a new financial architecture that would begin by fleshing out Brazil's highly feasible proposal to create a virtual and then physical common unit of account (regional currency). This Southern Currency would help reduce the region's dependence on the flows and cycles of global dollarization of the economy.
Convergence
The other challenge facing the new Unasur will be to create regional convergence dynamics between Latin American subregional integration mechanisms such as the Andean Community, the Pacific Alliance, Mercosur, ALBA, the Amazon Pact, the Association of Caribbean States, CARICOM, the Central American Integration System, CELAC and UNASUR itself.
It is about opening coordination spaces based on the construction of a matrix of good sectoral practices that help to join efforts, eliminate duplications and specialize specific areas.
For some time, with the support of CAF, a group specialized in integration technicians in the Scenarios Corporation of Colombia, which I chair, began working on the design of a convergence matrix that, without affecting the identity of the subregional mechanisms, allows a more efficient coordination of their activities.
Why have, for example, four or five conferences of ministers of education where they attend to talk about issues already discussed? This redesign for the institutional convergence of Unasur could delegate the management of major multilateral issues to CELAC, which would act as an ad hoc chancellery of the region to relate, as it has been doing, with other multilateral integration spaces such as China and the European Union or Africa.
The new Unasur must take care of closing social gaps and calamities such as extreme poverty, informality, unemployment and job insecurity, as well as the new digital divide. Its main beneficiaries must be the citizens of the region who ultimately inspire and justify all integration efforts.
Ernesto Samper Pizano is former president of Colombia and former secretary of Unasur.
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