The Common Market of the Southern Cone to the US foreign trade policy and the Free Trade Area of ​​the Americas.

Abstract

The article presents a very deep analysis about MERCOSUR integration scheme, its implications and impacts and the relation with NAFTA. It details the US external commercial politic, that has based on unilateralism, bilaterism and multilateralism, around those two integration models; it also talks about the interest  US has on Latin America and the Caribbean. The author affirms that MERCOSUR has been considerate as a response to NAFTA, with a different economic design, on a landscape of apparental fragmentation of regional integration process in America, because  the GATT became stagnant and because of the necessity, after the "lost decade", to look for some mechanisms to reactivate Latin-American economies.