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IBERO-AMERICA: Portugal Wants a Bigger Role

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Nov 7 2007 (IPS) - The Portuguese government has decided on a new strategy in Latin America: to cease being a wallflower at Ibero-American summits and take on a more active role, beyond the confines of Brazil, in relation to the Spanish-speaking countries.

President Aníbal Cavaco Silva and Prime Minister José Sócrates will both be attending the 17th Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile from Thursday to Saturday. Next year the heads of state and government of Latin America, Andorra, Spain and Portugal will be meeting in El Salvador, and in 2009, the summit will be hosted by Lisbon.

Since he took office in May 2005, Latin America has been one of the prime concerns of Sócrates, a pragmatic civil engineer belonging to the new generation of European socialists who have embraced the free-market economic model.

In this, he has the full support of the conservative Cavaco Silva, who backs the economic policies that Sócrates has followed.

Until the beginning of this century, Brazil was the sole focus of Portuguese political and diplomatic relations and investment in Latin America, for obvious historical and cultural reasons.

The exception was Venezuela, which has a community of 450,000 Portuguese, mostly working in trade and services. Consequently, Portugal has traditionally paid close attention to its relations with Venezuela.


However, Sócrates’ pragmatism is making Lisbon take a fresh look at Spanish- speaking Latin America, in contrast to the policies of former socialist Prime Minister Antonio Guterres (1995-2002), who on taking office announced that Brazil would be his “priority of priorities” in foreign policy.

Now, though, economic indicators in the rest of Latin America have made it attractive to Portuguese investment. For instance, Chile, one of the world’s main exporters of wine, uses corks supplied by a Portuguese company headed by Américo Amorim, who controls 67 percent of the world trade in cork.

“The various Latin American countries only arose because of the different colonial visions of Lisbon and Madrid, because the Spaniards founded several viceroyalties, while the Portuguese colony of Brazil was not subdivided,” Augusto Videla, an international affairs analyst, told IPS.

“And to be honest, if Brazil were divided into separate countries, it could easily accommodate 15 or 20 Central American countries,” he said.

It is often said, mistakenly, that “Latin America is Spanish-speaking, but people forget that this is only the case for the majority of countries and of the population, because in nearly half of South America, that is to say in Brazil, Portuguese is spoken,” Videla said.

Deputy Foreign Minister João Gomes Cravinho told IPS that “for 200 years Portugal has had close links with Brazil, and Ibero-American summits were not needed. But now Portugal has close relations with a number of Central and South American countries, especially Chile, which we did not have 12 or 15 years ago.”

The summits involving the countries of Latin America, Andorra, Spain and Portugal have created an opportunity to enrich and expand our international relations with Spanish- speaking Latin America, which would probably not have occurred without these meetings of the Ibero-American community, said Gomes Cravinho.

According to former President Mario Soares (1985-1995), Portugal influenced all of Latin America when leftwing army captains carried out the 1974 “Carnation Revolution”, the coup d’etat that overthrew the dictatorship in power in Lisbon since 1926.

“The Carnation Revolution and the success of the democratic transition in Spain (starting with dictator Francisco Franco’s death in late 1975) had a great influence on the later democratisation process of the whole of Latin America during the 1980s,” he said.

Nowadays the main thing is for us to have an “Iberian vision” for the Latin American region, said the veteran Portuguese politician, who in spite of turning 83 next month, continues to participate widely in civil society.

Do Spain and Portugal share a common vision of Latin America? IPS asked.

“I think so. At least, there is a convergent vision, which could be very influential in European terms, and in Latin America, which is an important global partner of the European Union,” replied Soares.

For the Iberian countries, “bringing the EU into a serious partnership with Latin America is greatly in the interests of both sides,” he added.

Does an effective Latin American unity exist? Is Ibero-America united? IPS asked.

“Yes, I would say there is unity amid the diversity of its member countries, based on the common history of the independence process,” he said.

Another important factor, in Soares’ view, “is the language of the discoverers and occupiers, because the original indigenous languages were not a force for unity, while Spanish and Portuguese are spoken by one-tenth of the global population, and 700 million people can understand each other in ‘Portunhol.’”

This is an ideal time to foster relations between Latin America and the EU, particularly through the mediation of Spain and Portugal, because at present “United States interests and concerns have shifted to the Middle East, leaving Latin America a bit out in the cold,” Soares said.

Furthermore, the last few years has been marked by “economic growth in Latin America, averaging five percent a year, while the strengthening of democracy and the numerous elections held in 2006 and 2007 have given it greater economic independence with respect to the U.S. and the EU, for example in the context of the WTO (World Trade Organisation),” he said.

In the political arena, Soares stressed that many countries in the region are to a certain extent rejecting the neo-liberal free-market economic model. “Competitiveness and economic growth are accepted, of course, but a priority is also being put on social justice, concern for people’s welfare, health, education, justice, employment, and above all, the need to overcome historical underdevelopment.”

However, “upon calm reflection, there are obvious dangers for the foreseeable future in Latin America, where dictatorships have given way to consolidated democracies of different characteristics,” he said.

More recently elected governments range from the moderate left, as in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, to more radical administrations with different nuances in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, he said.

“It would be a tragedy if deep divisions and conflicts were to arise between the moderate and the radical lefts. They would paralyse future progress in the region, as well as the necessary partnership of solidarity between the EU and Latin America,” Soares concluded.

 
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