UN General Assembly
1958

74. This means that the development of policy is lagging far behind that of ideas and that our practice belies our theoretical assertion regarding our common destiny. We shall not be able to achieve this common destiny so long as our markets are watertight compartments, our frontiers are barriers which obstruct the free flow of persons, capital and goods, and each country buries itself in its own domestic problems as though in a sealed vault. I must say in all candour that the Latin-American countries have made little or no progress in this task of transforming insular provincialism into integrated regionalism, that is, into a type of association which is designed to co-ordinate their financial and material resources and expand the volume of their economic activity. This regionalism should aim not at excluding certain nations or making them subordinate to others, but at providing a practical basis for a new sense of solidarity and at paving the way for the new kind of Latin-American community, which has been our ideal ever since the stormy era of our wars of independence.