![]() ![]() “The largest currency union is the United States.” The Constitution that founded the U.S. “Some of the coverage said that the sur would be the second-largest currency union after the EU, but that’s a mistake,” Athanasios Orphanides, an economics professor at MIT, told me. In effect, Ecuador joined someone else’s currency union, but without any of the privileges of membership. His solution was a desperate one: dollarization-in a way, the antithesis of el sur (literally, “the south”). “It’s a big dream, but a dream that has always fallen short.” During Mahuad’s term in office, in the late 1990s, the country faced an economic crisis so severe that the local currency collapsed. “The ideas of Latin American integration are so old,” Jamil Mahuad, a former president of Ecuador, told me. The plan for a currency union is merely the latest in a long history of treaties and proposals for creating a closer bloc in the region. The reality was more humdrum: a fancy way of saying they’d like to create a common currency, known as el sur. “Nothing is more emancipating than the fraternity of nations,” the presidents of Argentina and Brazil declared earlier this year, “coming together from the depths of history to make the future theirs.” This sonorous language-of emancipation and brotherhood-evoked the aspirations of South America’s great independence hero, the statesman Simón Bolívar. ![]()
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