Union of South American Nations – UNASUR

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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 EcuadorColombiaVenezuela, 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.

UNASUR Official site

Read the full Constituent Treaty of UNASUR (Spanish)

Howard Zinn: Anarchism Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Howard Zinn: Anarchism Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

Ziga Vodovnik: In your People’s History of the United States you show us that our freedom, rights, environmental standards, etc., have never been given to us from the wealthy and influential few, but have always been fought out by ordinary people — with civil disobedience. What should be in this respect our first steps toward another, better world?

Howard Zinn: I think our first step is to organize ourselves and protest against existing order — against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society. So that even if you don’t win some victory tomorrow or next year in the meantime you have created a model. You have acted out how future society should be and you created immediate satisfaction, even if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.

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