Mercosur

Mercosur or Mercosul (Spanish: Mercado Común del Sur, Portuguese: Mercado Comum do Sul, Guarani: Ñemby Ñemuha, Southern Common Market) is a sub-regional bloc. Its full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Its associate countries are Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Suriname. Observer countries are New Zealand and Mexico.

Its purpose is to promote free trade and the fluid movement of goods, people, and currency. The official languages are Spanish, Portuguese and Guarani. It has been updated, amended, and changed many times since. It is now a full customs union and a trading bloc. Mercosur and the Andean Community of Nations are customs unions that are components of a continuing process of South American integration connected to the Union of South American Nations.

History

Mercosur was established in 1991 by the Treaty of Asunción, which was later amended and updated by the 1994 Treaty of Ouro Preto.

Mercosur originated in 1985, when presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Integration and Economics Cooperation Program or PICE (Portuguese: Programa de Integração e Cooperação Econômica Argentina-Brasil, Spanish: Programa de Integración y Cooperación Económica Argentina-Brasil). The program also proposed the Gaucho as a currency for regional trade.

Pacific Alliance

The Pacific Alliance (Spanish: Alianza del Pacífico) is a Latin American trade bloc, with some features of further integration. It currently has four member states — Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, which all border the Pacific Ocean. Costa Rica began the process of joining the Alliance on 10 February 2014.

History

On 28 April 2011, former president of Peru Alan García organized a meeting with the presidents of Chile, Colombia and Mexico. This group of political leaders issued the Declaración de Lima, a statement of intent to establish the Pacific Alliance. The initial goal of the alliance was to further free trade with "a clear orientation toward Asia", and economic integration.

The four founding nations of the Pacific Alliance represent nearly 36% of Latin American GDP. If counted as a single country this group of nations would be the sixth largest economy in the world with a PPP GDP of more than US$3 trillion. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the countries of the Pacific Alliance together exported about $445 billion in 2010, almost 60% more than Mercosur, the other predominant Latin American trade bloc. Individually and collectively, the core countries of the Pacific Alliance have been deemed "The Pacific Pumas" by political scientists, for their model of economic and political development.

Latin America

Latin America is the group of territories and countries in the Americas where Romance languages are spoken. The term originated in 19th century France to include French-speaking territories in the Americas within the larger group of countries that speak Spanish and Portuguese. It is therefore marginally broader than the term Iberian America or Spanish America, though it excludes French-speaking Quebec. Latin America consists of twenty sovereign states and several territories and dependencies which cover an area that stretches from the southern border of the United States to the southern tip of South America, including the Caribbean. It has an area of approximately 19,197,000 km² (7,412,000 sq mi), almost 13% of the earth's land surface area.

As of 2015, its population was estimated at more than 626 million and in 2014, Latin America had a combined nominal GDP of 5,573,397 million USD and a GDP PPP of 7,531,585 million USD. The term "Latin America" was first used in 1861 in La revue des races Latines, a magazine "dedicated to the cause of Pan-Latinism".