On the third weekend of September, another summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) took place in Mexico City, in which one of the highlights is Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposal to have a community American economic.
The proposal made by the Mexican president is unclear, since, the only thing he explains is that the agreement must focus on the principles of non-intervention and self-determination of the peoples, cooperation for development and mutual aid to combat inequality. and discrimination.
The idea of López Obrador, although interesting, is poorly raised, since all economic integration in the European Union style entails setting aside the principle of non-intervention and building on legal frameworks that form common institutions for the region.
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If Andrés Manuel’s idea is an American community in the European style (as he raised it in CELAC), it is necessary to have a continental Congress, an institution that regulates regional monetary policy, a court that dictates judgments in disputes between countries, as well as a Constitution that should set standards for political, social and economic issues.
All of the above is the least that is needed to launch an integration project as proposed at the CELAC summit, and this means that the decisions in politics and the economy of a country can be questioned by the rest through the institutions that have been created for the region.
Therefore, one member country can question the electoral processes of another, while the regional court of justice can receive complaints from the affected population and wait for a resolution that must be followed by the government that caused the damage.
The other option raised by López Obrador is that of a trade agreement between Latin America, the United States and Canada, which is something that already exists, because when reviewing the regional trade agreements, Mexico, Central America, Chile, Colombia, Peru and the Dominican Republic they already have trade agreements with the United States.
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By reviewing the discourse of the Mexican government and the economic and political reality of the region, as well as the restrictions of non-intervention, integration as has been proposed in CELAC in the short and medium term is impossible.
At the moment, all Latin American governments are in favor of closing borders to prevent the free transit of migrants, at the same time that they find themselves without a coincidence regarding monetary policy, since, while some continue with dollarized economies, others are betting on cryptocurrencies and others more for the monetary orthodoxy.
There is also no consensus on the educational and labor models in the region, which is a major problem, since we do not know if there will be a priority to train manpower geared towards manufacturing that meets the demand in the United States or that is focused on innovation and allow the homogeneous development of the region. It is also not known what will happen in labor matters, since all integration implies being able to be formally employed in any of the member states of the region.
Due to all of the above, the risk of launching a regional integration such as the one proposed by Andrés Manuel in CELAC is that of job insecurity and economic stagnation, since, bearing in mind the non-intervention of institutions that regulate the activity, the only way to benefit from integration is to add efforts to the manufacturing generation and sell them to the United States.
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Experience has taught Latin America that becoming a manufacturing assembly country leaves the economy adrift when a third country is able to produce that good more efficiently and displace the original seller despite trade agreements or when demand is lower in times of economic crisis.
It seems that Andrés Manuel’s idea is to take advantage of the economic dynamism of the United States and the physical proximity that Latin America has with that country in order to take advantage of that commercial advantage, without realizing that in addition to being unfeasible to develop a country, it is something completely neoliberal. in the economic.
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The author is Professor of economics at UNAM, coordinator of the Unique Program of Specializations in Economics (Postgraduate, UNAM). Amateur runner and photographer in his spare time.*
The opinions expressed are solely the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and editorial line of Forbes Mexico.