Mercosur welcomes Venezuela, suspends Paraguay

Paraguay Suspended by Mercosur Bloc; Venezuela to Join
By Marcela Valente



BUENOS AIRES, Jun 30 2012 (IPS) - Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay decided Friday to suspend Paraguay from the Mercosur trade bloc in response to the impeachment of President Fernando Lugo, until elections are held in that country. They also announced that Venezuela would finally join as a full member.

No economic sanctions will be applied to Paraguay, to avoid hurting the Paraguayan people, said Argentine President Cristina Fernández, the host of the 43rd Mercosur (Southern Common Market) summit, which was held in the western Argentine province of Mendoza.

A week after Lugo was given less than 24 hours to prepare his defence and was impeached by the Senate, Paraguay’s partners in South America’s main trade bloc invoked the democratic clause, aimed at punishing countries that breach the democratic order.

According to the summit’s resolution, the suspension will last until the democratic order is fully re-established in Paraguay, which could happen after the new president to be elected in the April 2013 elections takes office in August next year.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/paraguay-suspended-by-mercosur-bloc-venezuela-to-join/

We could be, and other than the 1%, nobody in this country would lose a damn thing.

It's time for the U.S. to give up the "world leadership" thing. It's just another word for imperialism, and we got started by REBELLING against an empire, IIRC.

Gotta love how they leveraged the opportunity. Well played.

Seems as if that suspension was just as quick as Lugo's impeachment.

Oh, I see where Paraguayan officials were banned from Mercosur meetings. Nice to see them uphold democratic principles.

There's "Democratic" and "democratic" and "democratico" and "demokraticheskii" and ...

The dictionaries all give the meaning as 'democratic', but Stalin exalted his system--and 100 million people chimed in--as "democratic."

You see, democracy can be mob rule--if 50% of the population +1 decides that Africans aren't people, then they're not. That's democracy.

It can be representative, meaning that the people elect a subset to do the voting for them. Which is how we actually decided that Africans were 2/3 people.

It can be liberal, which means wedged into a certain ideology called "liberal." One of the features was that you needed a clear super(duper)majority to overturn certain basic principles that a minority, in setting up the government, decided were in the country's best interests. (The other variants of this involve different ideologies, all of which say 'majority rule is fine, but we have more important principles than majority rule.")

Then there are the oligodemocracies, where "democratic" means "rule by a small minority, who have the best interest of the people in mind." "The people" could be the actual population or it could be a term of art: Some such "democratic" systems have killed off a tithe of their populations by simply decreeing that those people weren't part of "the people." Sometimes in the interest of the 99% you just have to get rid of the other 30% or even the other 90%.

Unasur has also suspended Paraguay. Sure, it may not have happened, but it's okay to use to the past tense because the decision has been made. It just needs to be approved in a True Democratic process that is fair(tm) and equitable(tm).