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?
Takeaways
About Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Responses to “The United States of Latin America”

Content: In fact, as America's middle class threatens to crumble under the weight of the economic crisis, it will find itself in political territory that would be familiar to many south of the border. All the while, the middle classes of countries like Brazil or Colombia seem more confident about their prospects for the future. Many of Brazil's younger businessmen and bankers hold postgraduate degrees from American business schools. American hip hop is a staple of Amerindian and Afro-Latin American culture. And although Latin Americans do not tend to fight wars elsewhere, in South Africa I was constantly reminded of how important the presence of Cuban and other Latin American fighters was to the defeat of the apartheid regime based in Pretoria. 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.