Heine on Chile on the EU-Latin America Summit
On July 16, 2023, Ambassador Jorge Heine, Research Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Interim Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, wrote an article for La Tercera, titled “Columna de Jorge Heine: Chile en la cumbre UE-América Latina,” or “Jorge Heine’s Column: Chile on the EU-Latin America summit.”
In the article, Ambassador Heine focuses on President Boric’s tour of Europe, specifically his visits to Spain and France and his participation in the European Union-Latin America Sumit in Brussels, which has not been held since 2015. Over the past eight years, Latin America has been in crisis while dealing with the pandemic, experiencing the biggest GDP drop in more than a century, and Europe’s refusal to support Latin American countries throughout the pandemic, especially in terms of receiving Covid-19 vaccines.
Ambassador Heine goes on to discuss how the war in Europe has influenced their actions in re-establishing a relationship with Latin America. Countries in Latin America have viewed this as an opportunity to not side with the EU and NATO on the war in Ukraine and practice Non-Alignment to maintain an upper hand. He further confers Chile’s position in this situation and how they are a key player for Europe out of all of the Latin American countries. If Europe were to focus on its relationship with Chile, the result would be regional isolation as well as “a losing bet in a world whose geopolitical and geoeconomic axis is increasingly shifting from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific.”
Read the full article here.
Ambassador Jorge Heine is a Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He has served as ambassador of Chile to China (2014-2017), to India (2003-2007), and to South Africa (1994-1999), and as a Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government. Read more about Ambassador Heine on his Pardee School faculty profile.