Morales Leads Way for Latin American Harmony

South America's left wing leaders today attempted to forge closer economic ties at a showcase in Bolivia for the continent's so-called pink tide.

Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, opened a two-day summit largely made up of allies and ideological soulmates, victors in recent elections, in the valley city of Cochabamba.

The host was due to greet Ecuador's president-elect, Rafael Correa, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, in a lineup of radical and moderate leftwingers. The absence of Colombia's Alvaro Uribe left Peru's Alan Garcia as the sole rightwing flagbearer.

The summit of the Community of South American Nations, a body founded in 2004, was intended to turn rhetoric about regional solidarity into reality by bolstering trade and energy cooperation.

The hosts also assembled a parallel summit of indigenous groups, landless peasants and trade unions to emphasise that South America wanted to empower poor and marginalised groups.

However, festering bilateral disputes and economic constraints clouded the gathering, casting a pall over ambitious talk of European Union-style integration.

Ccooperation was hampered by South America's split into two trade blocs, Mercosur and the Community of Andean Nations, and bilateral rows which pitted Uruguay against Argentina over proposed paper mills, Bolivia against Chile over access to the sea and Venezuela against Peru, over mutual insults between their presidents.

Mr Chavez advocated reactivating a proposed continent-length gas pipeline but the cost and environmental impact made others hesitate.

Also on the agenda was a search for innovative financial tools to avoid the debt and dependency of relying on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Bolivia was expected to lead an attempt to change the region's terms of trade with the EU, an initiative Joe Zacune, an observer at Cochabamba for the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, welcomed as a way to benefit the environment and the poor.