President Luis Lacalle Pou said yesterday during the opening of ordinary sessions at the Parliament that “Brazil and Argentina “the negotiations undertaken by the Uruguay for a FTA (FTA) with China, a claim that he had already presented to his partners of the Mercosur last year.
“I’m not saying anything new if I say that Brazil and Argentina They blocked, and they are within their rights. They stop us from advancing bilateral agreements, for example, with China”, the president said when speaking during the beginning of legislative sessions in the Parliament, in which he reviewed his management.
Lacalle Pou, who began his last year of government and assured that during his four years in office “countless markets have been opened” internationally, most of them for “agricultural products.”
In any case, he admitted that the progress in agreements with blocs and with other countries is not what he “would have wanted” and insisted that “the challenge that the Mercosur is opening up to the world.”
“If we all go, we are stronger and, if we don’t all go, we go alone, because we are still strong enough to move in the world,” he said.
A dispute with history
At the summit of Mercosur held at the end of last year in Rio de Janeirothe Uruguayan president demanded to move towards a FTA with China, on the line in which the Uruguay is negotiating with Beijing, and at the same time to the rest of the countries of the bloc that do not oppose progress in bilateral negotiations.
“I believe that there is no will to advance in a FTA of the Mercosur with China. What we want is for (the rest of the member countries) not to oppose it,” said the Uruguayan president.
“We all know that the foreign affairs services have spoken individually with China to tell them that it would not be well regarded by the bloc to have bilateral agreements with any member country,” he said, looking at his peers from Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia, who participated for the first time as a full member.
In this sense, he highlighted that the understandings he signed with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, “it is expressly mentioned Mercosur”, so he asked the bloc partners to “assume that we went first and that you go, because China is willing.”
During a visit by Lacalle Pou to the Asian giant on November 23, both nations indicated in a joint document that China and Uruguay indicated their willingness to “promote dialogue on free trade between the Mercosur and China”.
In April, after a visit by the then former chancellor, Francisco Bustillo, to Beijing, The Chinese government had told Uruguay that he was interested in advancing in a TLC, but that he preferred to seal an agreement of this type with the Mercosur.
Source: Ambito
