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I. INTRODUCTION
IN 1991, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay signed the Treaty of Asunción to create the "Mercado Común del Sur" (The Common Market of the South), better known as Mercosur.1 The treaty sets up the framework of Mercosur and outlines the parties' goal to become a common market through the adoption of a common external tariff, a common trade policy, and the "free movement of goods, services, and factors of production between countries through, inter alia, the elimination of customs duties and non-tariff restrictions on the movement of goods."2 When Mercosur was created, the only other major trade bloc within the region was the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), whose members at the time included Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.3 The two trade blocs coexisted with relative ease, and the two even signed a free trade pact in 2004, vowing to phase out all import tariffs throughout the course of the next fifteen years.4
During 2005 and 2006, several events occurred that would each turn out to have a dramatic impact on the political and economic landscape of South America. On December 7, 2005, the United States and Peru announced that they had signed a bilateral free-trade agreement (FTA).5 Almost one year later, on November 22, 2006, the United States and Colombia signed a similar FTA.6
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, a fellow member of CAN with Colombia and Peru at the time of the signing of the FTA's, has never made much of a secret of his disdain for the United States.7 While speaking to the United Nations Assembly in 2006, he said that "the greatest threat looming over our Planet [is] the hegemonic pretention of the U.S. imperialism that puts at risk the very survival of humankind itself."8 He also went on to acknowledge that President George W. Bush had been at the United Nations the day before, but Chavez only referred to him as "the devil."9 Chavez also played a prominent role in the final collapse of the negotiations to create the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), a free-trade area first proposed by U.S. President George H.W. Bush that was to stretch from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and include every country in the Americas except Cuba.10...