Lafta Agreement

However, each Member State is taking the necessary steps to harmonize the provisions of existing agreements with the objectives of this treaty. Regional or partial agreements may include tariff relief and trade promotions; The economic supplement Agricultural trade; cooperation in financial, customs and health services; Protecting the environment scientific and technological cooperation; Promoting tourism; technical standards and many other areas. Article 7: Partial agreements are agreements in which not all Member States participate. These agreements aim to create the conditions for a deepening of the regional integration process through their gradual multilateralization. Article 14: Member States can, by appropriate regulations, establish specific rules for the conclusion of other modalities of agreements with scope. Any Latin American country can join the Montevideo Treaty of 1980. Cuba was the last country to become a full member on 26 August 1999. In addition, ALADI is open to all Latin American countries through agreements with other countries and regions of the continent`s integration, as well as with other developing countries or their respective integration territories outside Latin America. In the early 1990s, the United States began to establish free trade agreements with individual countries. The most important of these was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a free trade area between Mexico, Canada and the United States. This new trade has once again attracted the interest of a larger U.S. free trade area. That is why the Organization of American States proposed in 1993 the implementation of the United States Free Trade Area (FTA) in 2005.

However, since 2007, political opposition in the United States and Latin America has prevented its adoption. Nevertheless, more Latin American countries have free trade agreements with the United States, and in 2004 the United States and Central America signed a free trade pact. In 2007, the United States was still negotiating economic agreements with Peru and Colombia. Article 8: Agreements within the scope of partial application may cover trade, economic supplementation, agriculture, trade promotion or adopt other modalities in accordance with Article 14 of the Treaty. Article 45: All benefits, favourable treatment, deductibles, immunities and privileges that have already been granted or will be granted under agreements between Member States or between Them and third countries to facilitate border traffic, apply exclusively to countries that have signed them or may have signed them. Article 4: For the purposes of fulfilling the fundamental obligations of the association covered by Article 2 of the Treaty, Member States herely create an area of economic preferences including a regional tariff preference, agreements on the regional scope and agreements with a partial scope. Article 44: All benefits, favourable treatments, deductibles, immunities and privileges applied by Member States to products originating from or bound by another Member State or third country, resulting from decisions or agreements not provided for by this Treaty or the Cartagena Convention, are extended without delay and without conditions to other Member States.