Common Market For Latin America

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 13

Common Market For Latin America

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

PUNTA DEL ESTE (Uruguay), April 14.

Latin American Presidents in Punta del Este agreed last night to establish their own Common Market, United States sources said.

The Presidents—at their three-day summit conference in this Uruguayan luxury coastal resort—agreed that the market should be in operation by 1985, the sources said.

They said that a final summit document to be signed by the Heads of State today would announce: “The Presidents resolve to create progressively, beginning in 1970. the Latin American Common Market which shall be substantially in operation in a period of no more than 15 years.” President Johnson, who is attending the meeting, would also announce his firm support for “this promising Latin American initiative” in a notation attached to the document, the sources forecast.

The sources also said that all the Presidents were expected to sign the document with the possible exception of Ecuador.

Contrary to earlier reports by diplomatic sources, the United States officials said that Ecuador had indicated at a private meeting yesterday that it still maintained its reservations about trade and aid. The other Latin American nations, the United States officials said, did not agree to accept the wording proposed by Ecuador. They added that the reservations would appear in the minutes of the summit meeting. The final document will be

known as the “Declaration of the Presidents of America.”

through multi-national projects. “We will join in efforts to increase substantially Latin America’s foreign trade earnings. “We will modernise the living conditions of our rural populations, raise agricultural productivity in general and increase food production for the benefit of both Latin America and the rest of the world.”

According to the sources, the key proposals agreed upon in the declaration of the policy were:

Latin America will create a Common Market. (This was a declaration by the Latin American Presidents and not by the United States.) “We will lay the physical foundations for Latin American integration