With the current leadership, hardly.
Vazquez goverment here in Uruguay has a foreign relationships blunder after the other, plus flip-flops between positions depending on who he´s talking to; with Chavez pounds the table and yields “free trade treaty with the USA?, nuts!”, then in Washington, “a FTT is within our aims”, rinse and repeat…
Kirchner wouldn´t mind starting a second Falklands if that would give him short term gains, the press is affraid of speaking against him and throws thinly veiled threats to its neighbours. He is a fine example of the worst of Argentine populist political class.
Lula is doing fairly well, must be wearing some teflon coated suits ´cause the corruption and smuth scandals in his goverment didn´t stick on him; the guy seems quite pragmatical and to be honest one of the few competent leaders around here.
Paraguay is quite out of the scope, which is probably a good thing, I can´t remember hearing about Nicanor Duarte in a good while.
Bachelet in Chile has just been elected a few months ago, as usual for a Chilean leader (since democracy returned at last) she seems to be pragmatic on her socialism, which is what is needed now in America, that´s point in favour; but what she does, or is able to do in the current continental climate remains to be seen; I predict Chile will keep going at it´s own pace without bothering too much with the way things are done the other side of the Andes.
In Bolivia things are hairy, with another populist ideologue that could make a big mess real quickly; for starters Evo Morales nationalized oil and gas fields, for the first one he went in with the army and media to seize it, it was a Petrobras field (oil state company of Brazil)… needless to say that didn´t look good from an American unification point of view. I could almost hear Lula´s teeth grinding from down here.
Peru is on the middle of an election, if Humala wins, well, that could get nasty too, nothing better to throw in the mix than a new nationalistic ideologue that makes Chavez look tame in comparision.
And then there´s Chavez how really doesn´t need presentation. He´s strong on American Unification under a re-cooked revolutionary ideal of some sort; Og help us all of South American revolutionary luminaries.
He´s using petro-dollars to throw candy at other goverments, and gain support for his political figure that can be described as: 1) Blame the USA, and 2) Act Pious. He´s looked as a great socialism paradigm by many which mostly don´t seem to grasp that it is sustented on riches not available to all other countries in the region.
I still cringe when I remember hearing him giving a speech over here where he said how the US wanted to kill him, and (not exact words but the conveyed meaning) that if he died we should remember who did it and march in arms against Bush; the worst thing were the cheering masses.
So… basically Brazil and Chile are the countries you can count on doing things rationally, but on their own merry way. Uruguay, I couldn´t tell, the clowns in charge doesn´t seem to have decided what to do yet; the president goes from white to black on the flick of a finger; on the up side they are not prone to do crazy things, they are just incompetent on foreign relationships.
To be honest, the idea of American Unification at this point is very remote, pragmatism and rationality is a secondary concern on large parts of the continent for that to be feasible.
What does Uruguay have in common with Italy?