Se Viene el Estallido!
UNASUR Official site -Español & English
Union of South American Nations – Wikipedia
The Union of South American Nations (Dutch: Unie van Zuid-Amerikaanse Naties, Portuguese: União de Nações Sul-Americanas, Spanish: Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, and abbreviated as UNASUR and UNASUL) is a supranational and intergovernmental union that will unite two existing customs unions – Mercosur and the Andean Community – as part of a continuing process of South American integration. It is modelled on the European Union.
The UNASUR Constitutive Treaty was signed on May 23, 2008, at the Third Summit of Heads of State, held in Brasília, Brazil. [2] According to the Constitutive Treaty, the Union’s headquarters will be located in Quito, Ecuador. The South American Parliament will be located in Cochabamba, Bolivia, while its bank, the Bank of the South, will be located in Bogota, Colombia. The Union’s former designation, the South American Community of Nations, abbreviated as CSN, was dropped at the First South American Energy Summit on April 16, 2007.
The Origins:
Simón Bolívar, directly responsible for the independence of Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and parts of Peru and Bolivia in the early years of the 19th century, and honored with statues in the capital cities of practically every Latin American country, had the goal of creating a federation of nations to ensure prosperity and security after independence. Bolívar never achieved this goal, and died an unpopular figure because of his heavy-handed attempts to establish strong central governments in the nations he led to independence. Throughout the years, many in South America have called for social, political, and economic union. UNASUR is intended to be a concrete step towards the achievement of such union.