President Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay announced on Wednesday that his country would negotiate a free trade agreement with communist China despite the provisions of the country’s membership in the regional Mercosur trade bloc, which prevent any one country from doing so with non-member states.
Lacalle Pou assumed the presidency in early 2020 as the first self-proclaimed non-leftist president in Uruguay since his father, Luis Alberto Lacalle, was president in the 1990s. He has used his international platform to vocally condemn socialist and communist regimes in the Americas, particularly feuding with the Castro regime in Cuba and elevating his profile in the regional right-wing. His tenure has also been marked, however, by the pursuit of closer entanglements with the largest and most powerful communist party on earth, headquarted in Beijing.
During a press conference in Montevideo on Wednesday, Lacalle Pou told reporters that his administration had always pursued a “clearly pro-opening-up” policy, meaning seeking as much international trade and diplomacy as possible and negotiating a free trade agreement with China to advance that goal. China is already Uruguay’s largest trade partner and a major – and growing – influence in the region, a product of the absence of any coherent policy of engagement from the administration of President Joe Biden in the United States.
“Agreements indicate prosperity, opportunities, and work. What keeps us up at night since the beginning of the government is trying to sell, to commercialize the products, raw materials, industrialized products, and technology of our country,” Lacalle Pou asserted. He dismissed at the press conference concerns that being a member of Mercosur simply does not allow Uruguay to cut free trade agreements independently without the rest of the bloc also participating.
“From our point of view and given Mercosur’s active international norms, we are ready to move forward. We always said also that we do not want to advance alone,” Lacalle Pou explained, “we all know the weight that Mercosur has in the demographic and economic dimensions to advance together. What Uruguay is not ready to do is to stay still.”
Mercosur is a small trade bloc consisting only of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Three of the four nations maintain close ties to China; Paraguay maintains diplomatic relations with democratic Taiwan, which prevents it from establishing ties to Beijing, as the latter illegally claims Taiwan as a rogue “province.” Argentina’s socialist President Alberto Fernández joined China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) this year during a visit to Beijing in which he also honored the corpse of mass murderer Mao Zedong. Brazil, like Uruguay, boasts a nominally “conservative” president, Jair Bolsonaro. But Bolsonaro, too, has traveled to Beijing to cut trade deals and has falsely claimed the largest communist country in the world is “capitalist” to defend his closeness with the Communist Party there. Bolsonaro’s administration has expressed interest in Belt and Road.
The BRI is a global program in which China offers poorer countries predatory loans, which the countries sometimes cannot repay, to build expensive infrastructure projects. When the countries cannot repay the debt, the Communist Party seizes its assets. Among the most severely impacted victims of the BRI currently are socialist Sri Lanka, where the economy has entirely collapsed; Nigeria, which barely has functional electricity at the moment; and Pakistan, which has seen a rise in terrorist violence against known Chinese assets.
The major difference between Lacalle Pou’s China proposal and those of the other Mercosur countries is that he is seeking a complete free trade deal, which Mercosur rules explicitly prohibit without the other bloc countries approving. Only Chile, Peru, and Costa Rica in the region have signed full trade deals with China.
The Chinese government has not responded to Lacalle Pou’s remarks on Wednesday in an official capacity at press time. In September, when Lacalle Pou first began touting a free trade deal despite Mercosur rules, the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper accused the United States, which has played no visible role in any of the negotiations, of pressuring the South American countries to disapprove of the deal.
“In addition to the legal obstacles, there is an undertone of political interference from the US,” the Global Times claimed. “Shortly after Uruguay’s government said its pursuit in a free trade agreement with China, some Western media outlets claimed that the US’ backyard may become the new battlefield between the US and China.”
The outlet did not elaborate on the allegation.
Lacalle Pou has condemned the Biden administration in discussions about trade with China in the past as well. In May, the Uruguayan president told the BBC that Biden’s White House “not have a vision of Latin America” and that Biden believed that “from the Mexican border down to Tierra del Fuego we all have the same problems and the same needs.”
Lacalle Pou also insisted that Uruguay had no interest in the BRI because “we don’t need infrastructure.”
Asked about the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights atrocities, including genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan, Lacalle Pou dismissed the topic entirely.
“One thing is trade and another thing is human rights, ideology or whatever,” the “center-right” leader said.
Lacalle Pou has been far more vocal in condemning weaker Communist Parties close to home.
“When one sees that there is no full democracy in countries, that there is no respect for separation of powers, when those in power use repressive forces to silence proposals,” Lacalle Pou said in public remarks in September at a regional conference, “when dissidents are jailed, when human rights are not respected, we should state with concern what happens in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.”
He also directly confronted Cuban puppet “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel at an international summit, stating of Uruguay, “in my country, luckily, the opposition can organize petitions, the opposition has democratic recourse to complain … that is the great difference with the Cuban regime.”
Lacalle Pou has yet to note in his condemnation of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua that all three are close allies of China’s and receive lavish support from the world’s most powerful communist country. Cuba is a BRI member nation. Like Uruguay, Nicaragua’s communist Sandinista regime is currently brokering a free trade agreement with China. In socialist Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s illegitimate regime has largely been kept afloat by Chinese loans.
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