About CELAC

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 25/01/2023

On the occasion of the CELAC meeting in Buenos Aires, the world made an inventory of regional coordination and integration organizations. In Latin America, one of the least integrated regions in the world, there are a total of 16 supranational integration organizations. Europe in contrast has only one organization: the European Union. Africa, with the largest territory and population, has a total of 8. The European Union represents an integrated economic area of 14.5 trillion euros. The 16 integration organizations in Latin America represent a GDP of 5.4 trillion dollars.

And perhaps in this multiplicity of organizations lies the answer to the lack of integration and effective territorial control by the nations that inhabit the territory that extends south of the Rio Grande.

In the economic dimension, the absence of integration creates severe limitations to development, since in order to develop as the countries of South East Asia and Singapore have done, it is necessary to transcend the narrowness of the domestic market, bringing to the national territory a link in the value chain of the international market. Thus, efficiency is achieved and with it innovation and employment. Disintegration prevails in Latin America both between regional economies and between these and international markets. Thanks to this, we have been living for 500 years in paralyzed economies that are incapable of absorbing labor or generating enterprises that create individual wealth.

From a political point of view, the absence of integration favors the perpetuation in power of the heads of public and private corporations, which stops the generational renewal of leadership and social mobility. This leads to the perpetuation of institutions that are refractory to change, rigid and permanently outdated. To the extent that societies advance, social dissent and urban mobilizations end up creating institutional fragmentation. This is how the loss of control over the territory appears and the doors begin to open to non-state actors with a perverse orientation such as transnational organized crime. Institutional fragmentation prevents the concentration of resources in a fundamental objective for these modern times: the control of the territory to prevent the penetration of transnational organized crime.

However, in the 100 points that make up the CELAC declaration in Buenos Aires, this real and dangerous scenario is not mentioned. They prefer to collect outdated slogans from the seventies of the last century while a group of narco regimes governed by the political arms of transnational organized crime are disguised as revolution. And even though these regimes are today a minority, their evolution indicates that they are engulfing many governments in the Caribbean and South Central America whose gravitation in CELAC favors their expansion. Perhaps the time has come to face this metastatic process by putting an end to the number of regional integration institutions and initiating the regionalization of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime as apparently Dr. Patricia Bullrich is attempting and thanks to it Buenos Aires did not enjoy the visit of the head of the Venezuelan regime.

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