When it comes to economic integration, the EU continues to be the world reference, a model that inspired the integration processes in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the 1960s onwards, blocs such as the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), today the Latin American Integration Association (LAIA), the Andean Community, the Central American Common Market (CACM), the Caribbean Common Market (CARICOM) and Mercosur began to emerge.
The multiple processes, which in many cases have similar objectives, led to the need to evaluate the possibility of the different blocs converging on those issues where greater articulation can be achieved. It is not a matter of founding new blocs and losing the nature of the existing ones, but of creating new spaces where common interests are identified in the regional agenda.
In the case of South America, the development of the Andean integration scheme and that of Mercosur were outstanding, not only in terms of their ambitious original objectives, but also in their regulatory and institutional development. Given these characteristics, and mainly driven by Brazil, interest in achieving convergence between the two main regional blocs soon began. Although this process began with the creation of the South American Community of Nations, the main idea soon migrated to UNASUR, an organization that acquired a political edge and abandoned the possibility of promoting economic convergence between the aforementioned trade blocs.
On the other hand, the Andean Community began to show differences among its members regarding the insertion strategy, particularly in the negotiations with the United States and the EU, which led to the definitive withdrawal of Venezuela from the bloc and its entry into Mercosur as a full member, a process that initiated a long period of politicization that postponed any deepening of ties with the Andean economies. It is in this context that two of the members of the Andean Community began to approach the Chilean vision of external insertion, coinciding with an economic vision that at the time was not followed by Chavez's Venezuela, but neither by Morales' Bolivia nor by Correa's Ecuador. The aforementioned process evidenced the need for regional spaces that bring together countries with common interests, which soon became a reality with the Latin American Pacific Arc Initiative and, since 2011, with the Pacific Alliance (PA). Once formed, the Pacific bloc managed to capture the interest of an economy the size of Mexico, which decided to join as an original member and gave the Alliance a significant geopolitical component.
For all these reasons, in the early years there was a contrast of models between the PA and Mercosur, presenting the new process as a more modern, flexible, less bureaucratic option, more open to the world and mainly in the direction of the Asia-Pacific, rather showing a business approach than a political one as Mercosur did at that time. These were comparisons between two models which, although in some cases had some support, many of the debates were based on enormous simplifications.
