The Decline of UNASUR and the Crisis of South American Regionalism

“Back upon a time,” on December 14, 2011, then Colombian Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín delivered the instrument of ratification of the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty to the General Secretariat of this organization in Quito. That same day she declared that "we are among the most committed in this process of integration, in which we firmly believe". Undoubtedly, these were different times for South American politics in general and the Colombian agenda in particular. Who would have thought that seven years later the newly inaugurated President of Colombia, Ivan Duque Márquez and his Foreign Minister, Carlos Holmes Trujillo, would announce the irreversible withdrawal of Colombia from the organization? This decision, formally announced on August 28, 2018 (with a statutory six months’ notice) is one more sign of the decline of this organization, which has had no General Secretary since 2017 and has already lost seven of its original twelve members – Colombia, the five other countries that simultaneously suspended their participation on April 20, 2018 (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru) and Ecuador, which formally withdrew on 13 March 2019. This leaves Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela as active members – for now. The foregoing indicates that we are entering a new phase in the evolution of South American foreign policy, which seems to be returning to the classic multilateralism led by the United States and represented by the Organization of American States (OAS), or Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) in Spanish. The collective defection of more than half of UNASUR’s membership signals the start of the deconstruction process of South America as a geo-political bloc and an important actor on the global international arena.