South American countries agree to eliminate visa requirement for their citizens

South American countries agree to eliminate visa requirement for their citizens
Tuesday, December 05, 2006

The Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Nationals from all 12 South American nations will soon be able to travel freely throughout their region without needing visas, a regional foreign ministers summit in Chile has agreed.

The decision exempts the visa requirement for nationals from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The decision "represents a step in our efforts to eliminate our traditional divisions," said Chilean Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley who inaugurated the daylong conference. The visa exemption is expected to become effective within 90 days. Regional integration is the main subject in the ministers' agenda.
(snip/)

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743488-37.stm

Based on the European Union?

Another alliance that leaves the United States shivering in the cold? Thanks, George, for alienating everyone and paying no attention to our vital neighbors.

Why wouldn't we?

Are you kidding me?

There is speculation that we went into Iraq only because Saddam was going to start dealing oil in euros not dollars.

No. We do NOT like large groups of nations banding together to benefit each other and not us. Even if it's on our model.

But right now all I'm thinking is that the North American wheat belt is going to move entirely into Canada by 2050. Where is the South American wheat belt going to be?

Most Americans aren't even imagining the concept of drought and famine from sea to shining sea. But I am.

Other nations are getting ready and we aren't.

My "we" includes Europe and South America. Actually it includes everyone. I wonder who is included in Cheney's "we"?

I thnk they liked the EU up into the point they had the same currency anyway.

We're The World's Only Superpower.

When your Number One you learn to play with yourself.

You don't need allies, national health care, or a decent infrastructure when you're Number One.

The Constitution disappears into thin air; but the flag is still there in the land of the free and the home of the Whopper.

:evilgrin:

nashville. great movie.

Excellent news.

I didn't even know about this until I listened to Noam Chomsky today on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. The mainstream American press is pathetic. They should be ashamed.

It is ironic that South America is going the other way, as North America becomes more strict in these requirements. I wonder if Mexico will join the South American countries in this?

Hasn't it been just ID and a birth certificate for a while now?

Land travel will be a little later (within the year, I think). Previously, passports weren't necessary.

Is there a difference between a visa and a passport? I had assumed they amounted to pretty much the same thing.

Q: What is the difference between a passport and a visa?

A: A visa is permission granted by the government of a country to an alien to enter that country and to remain for a specific period of time. It is the responsibility of the traveler to obtain necessary visas, if any, before proceeding abroad. Visas are obtained from the embassy or consulate of the countries to which the applicant wishes to travel.
http://www.americanpassport.com/Passport_QA.html


And here's a list of various countries, where a US Citizen would need a passport, visa or both:
http://www.americanpassport.com/ForeignEntryRequirements.html

please

or are the SA populists doing the heavy lifting for the corporate globalists? I don't think the SA people would ever have trusted this to the corporatists who previously held power but they have placed a lot of faith in the current crop of lefties. I'm starting to be concerned that some future SA leader will be handing an "integrated" South America to the corporate vultures on a silver platter. :tinfoilhat:

it is not very nice to have to jump thru hoops to get a visa to enter a country, being able to travel on passport alone is a significant streamlining and, yeah, it will help people conduct business and also travel between these countries more freely

how it is bad? would you like to have to apply for a freakin' visa every time you wanted to visit mexico or canada, i think not, the visa is a hassle that ought to disappear and has largely disappeared in north america, why not in the south?

concentrate wealth at the top.

For the first time since the Spanish conquestadors LatAm is uniting. Thanks to the NeoCons--Bush the Uniter does it again. :evilgrin:

<clips>

...AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in Boston.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I’ll start with last weekend. Important city in South America, Cochabamba, with quite a history. There was a meeting last weekend in Cochabamba in Bolivia of all the South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I’ll read you a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

In last Saturday, the South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of all the nations, and there was the two-day summit of what's called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders -- reading just now --agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the -- I’m reading from the AP report -- the result left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient -- normal stance. They went on. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

There is one -- has been one point of hostility in South America. That's Peru, Venezuela. But it points out that Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that was the only real conflict in South America. So that seems to have been smoothed over.

The new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.

Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia's rich gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa, the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela, as I’m sure you know, is the only -- it which points out -- is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even incomparable to Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s very important in the general global context. I’ll return to a couple of words about that.

There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.

This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there has been real moves towards integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. I mean, there have been -- I’m sure you know -- attempts at independence, but they've been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support, because there was very little regional cooperation, so you can pick them off one by one.

That’s what happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil, the first of which happened right after the assassination was already planned. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them, but only one finally ended up with reaching Central America, with Reagan's terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America, similar things happening in the Caribbean. But that was sort of a one-by-one operation of destroying one country after another. And it had the expected domino effect. It’s the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests, which were horrendous. It’s only beginning to be understood how horrendous they were.

But integration does lay the basis for potential independence, and that's of extreme significance. The colonial history -- Spain, Europe, the United States -- not only divided countries from one another, but it also left a sharp internal division within the countries, every one, between a very wealthy small elite and a huge mass of impoverished people. The correlation to race is fairly close. Typically, the rich elite was white, European, westernized; and the poor mass of the population was indigenous, Indian, black, intermingled, and so on. It's a fairly close correlation, and it continues right ‘til the present.

The white, mostly white, elites were not -- who ran the countries -- were not integrated with -- had very few interrelations with the other countries of the region. They were Western-oriented. You can see that in all sorts of ways. That's where the capital was exported. That's where the second homes were, where the children went to the universities, where their cultural connections were, and so on. And they had very little responsibility in their own societies. So there’s very sharp division.

more....

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1433244


(L-R bottom row ) President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, President of Bolivia Evo Morales, President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, (L-R top row) Secretary for South American Affairs of Mexico Jorge Chen, Representative of Surinam Robby Ramlakhan, Vice-president of Argentina Daniel Scioli and Foreign Minister of Colombia Consuelo Araujo pose for an official photo at the South American Community of Nations summit in Cochabamba December 9, 2006. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo


Supporters of social unions participate at the closing act of the Social summit for the integration of the nations, simultaneously to the South American summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia December 9, 2006. REUTERS/David Mercado (BOLIVIA)