Mercosur or ftaa? Ruling class, government and regional insertion in thbeginning of Kirchnerism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the government, business corporations of the ruling class and the MERCOSUR and FTAA projects at the beginnings of Kirchner’s administration. The main hypothesis is: the changes in the regional insertion of Argentina from 2003 (reconstruction of the MERCOSUR and rejection of the FTAA), had among its reasons the corporation actions of the Argentinian Industrial Union (UIA) and the Argentinian Rural Society (SR). As Katz (2006) points out, that regional reconfiguration, besides being influenced by the social antineoliberal protests, it also responded to the demand of a different regional insertion on the part of the ruling local classes. By means of the analysis of the written press and of documentation of the corporations, we will observe the positions on the FTAA and the MERCOUSR, the type of government intervention that they claim and why they support or reject the negotiations between 2003 and 2004, at the meeting of the Round Cancún's Doha of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in the Minisummits of the FTAA in Miami and Puebla, where FTAA negotiations were halted and the reorientation of MERCOSUR took place