The Role of MERCOSUR as a Vehicle for Latin American Integration

I. INTRODUCTION

In early July 2004, the foreign and economic ministers of the four member states of the Common Market of the Southern Cone ("MERCOSUR") convened in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, for the twenty-sixth meeting of the economic integration organization's most powerful institutional body, the Council of the Common Market ("CMC").1 To a large extent, the exhilarating optimism and flowery rhetoric at the convention seemed characteristically hollow, considering that the common market has yet to achieve its first and most basic goal of establishing a common external tariff and that MERCOSUR's two largest members, Argentina and Brazil, were locked in a bitter trade dispute over …