Bolivia joins Mercosur during summit focused on economic cooperation

The presidents of the Mercosur member countries - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela - on Friday announced that Bolivia had been accepted as the bloc's newest full member.

This decision, taken during the 48th Mercosur Summit being held in Brasilia, must still be vetted by the Brazilian and Paraguayan parliaments.

The Summit saw the participation of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Argentina's Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Paraguay's Horacio Cartes, Uruguay's Tabare Vazquez and Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, who were joined by Bolivia's Evo Morales.

The countries were united on Friday as to the need to strengthen economic relations within the bloc. After a private meeting that lasted over one hour, the plenary session was opened by Rousseff, whose speech focused on the common agenda and on the development activities carried out under Brazil's presidency of the group in the last six months.

According to Rousseff, the Mercosur countries have avoided the worst consequences of the international economic crisis in recent years. She also said that the priority for the bloc was to seek greater economic integration, which was one of the reasons to invite Bolivia to join after a three-year approval process.

However, she stated that the fragile recovery of developed countries meant that the Mercosur region needed to take on new economic policies capable of "consolidating the successes of recent years while being coupled with domestic reforms".

"Mercosur is a fundamental tool as it has seen intra-regional commerce multiply by 12 times since its foundation. In the same time, global trade has grown fivefold," she added.

However, she warned that the region was seeing "an economic slowdown", requiring members to strengthen trade within Mercosur. "The crisis does not justify that we erect barriers between ourselves. Solidarity must prevail," she said.

Rousseff also paid credit to the importance of the Fund for Structural Convergence (FOCEM), which was extended to 2025 in order to help balance out the economic differences within the bloc. She gave an account of Brazil's time in the rotating presidency, including the advancement of negotiations with the EU about a free trade agreement, while having begun discussions with Lebanon, Tunisia, South Korea and Japan.

She expressed her confidence that the target set in Brussels on July 15 would be kept and that Mercosur and the EU would exchange their commercial offers in the fourth quarter of 2015. In conclusion, Rousseff wished luck to the President of Paraguay Horacio Cartes, who assumes the rotating presidency from Friday until December 2015. In 2014, exports within the Mercosur bloc reached 51.9 billion U.S. dollars and 380.6 billion U.S. dollars with the rest of the world.

Mercosur, a subregional bloc established in 1991, aimed at promoting free trade and the fluid movement of goods, people, and currency. Endite