Title: The United States of Latin America - The Globalist
Headings: The United States of Latin America
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The United States of Latin America
In the aftermath of the economic crisis, could Latin America become a new world economic leader?
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About Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Responses to “The United States of Latin America”

Content: The Latin American decision to set up a Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which also finds inspiration in the European dream of union, is crucial in order to understand the world order that will take us into the next century. This is because it acknowledges that the alternative — of this crisis lasting a very long time or being systematically followed by other crises — is simply unacceptable. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States has gathered around the goal of redefining the international monetary system in the name of national sovereignty and regional poles, on the one hand, and the philosophy of the equality of commercial and economic relations in and between societies, on the other. In this sense, it recognizes that the growing inequality within and between nations — which generates broken societies and leads to conflict — cannot be allowed to continue. For Europeans and Americans, Latin America is still little more than their underdeveloped sibling, its inhabitants pitching up on its shores or struggling across the Rio Grande into the United States. It is a place of exuberant music, mesmerizing football, extravagant beauty, fantastic literature, and drug trafficking, caudillos, dictatorship and guerrilla warfare — in short, exotic, dangerous and exciting. However, by being unafraid to turn its back on some commonly held economic views that have now lost their currency, and energized by the creativity of its younger population and the collective discipline and memory of its Indian and Afro-Latin American grassroots, Latin America is making its presence felt from Brasilia to London and from Buenos Aires to New York. Editor's Note: This essay has been drawn from Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's "What if Latin America Ruled the World?: How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century" published by the Bloomsbury Press on September 14, 2010.