New South American Socialist Populist Alliance

What if the Latin American Nations in South America, ruled by Populist Left Wing leaders would join forces, to create a sort of Soviet Union of the South?

Certainly the leaders of several such nations are dreaming of such a thing, more or less created by their dislike of the USA and the West in general. So what if these nations join in a continental large power, of the combined South American Nations, or at least most of them, with exceptions in the North (Colombia) and South (Chili and Argentina), who remain neutral and would not join such a powerblock, due to their own reasons.

The primary focus is the question: Would such a new block be capable of infuencing world affairs seriously, simmilar to the old USSR in the Cold War?

How would it function and how could it succeed, against the odds of things like economic blockade and a stronger, more unified UN, in international affairs?

Finally, How would the new government in the current USA under President Obama react on such a thing?
 
What if the Latin American Nations in South America, ruled by Populist Left Wing leaders would join forces, to create a sort of Soviet Union of the South?
What, you mean a development of ALBA? The trouble is, you'd have to have Brazil for such a thing to be viable, at which point language becomes a fairly large stumbling block for the creation of any sort of political union beyond "alliance" (something which Brazil is wary of anyway, and something which the other leaders would want to avoid, given the preponderance of power Brazil would hold in any such union/alliance).
 

Firstly this belongs in Future History.

Secondly no one in South America wants to create a Neo-Soviet Union, the Union of South American Nations and South American Unification
overall predates the USSR by a century, originally inspired by Simon Bolivar, who helped many South American nations gain independence
from Spain.
 
I don't think Brazil would want to be part of an alliance that is explicitly socialist and anti-American, and which would imply losing a great part of her national soveraignity. And without Brazil, you just have a loose allianze between Venezuela and a couple of small Andean nations, like Bolivia, Perú and maybe Ecuador. You might also add Cuba and some Central American countries... but in any case, it won't be a threat to anybody, not even to thos Latin American country who aren't part of the alliance
 
Well, Portugese and Spanish are closely related languages, so the effective barrier isn't all that large. There are many examples of states or alliances working in two languages - Canada, Belgium, Ukraine for example are all bilingual. Switzerland is quadrilingual. The European Union has a mess of languages.

It's unlikely that any of the South American countries would be willing to surrender their sovereignty to the point of a USSR. Nor is Soviet style socialism likely to make a comeback. But on the other hand - moderate third world socialism or swedish type socialism is still an attractive pathway, particularly given the spectacular failure of american market ideolatry. Something like a Latin American EU is very likely.

Essentially, the Bush administration largely ignored South America and Latin America, focusing instead on Iraq and the middle east. This has opened a window of opportunity for South American states to try and slip the American yoke and form mutually beneficial trading arrangements.

As to whether anything comes of it, hard to say.

But the developing trend seems to be towards large economic and population blocks - EU, China, India, NAFTA. South America may have some chance to chart its own destiny, or be roadkill on the superhighway.
 
Top