What CAN is and how it works

What was signed, and what it left open

The Andean Subregional Integration Agreement was signed at Bogotá on 26 May 1969 by Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and entered into force on 16 October 1969. It is known as the Cartagena Agreement. Article 133 states that it may not be signed with reservations and leaves it open to the accession of the other countries of Latin America, with the preferential treatment Chapter XV reserves for Bolivia and Ecuador extended to any acceding country of lesser relative economic development. Article 134 gives it indefinite duration. Venezuela acceded in 1973. Chile withdrew in 1976. The Trujillo Protocol of 1996 rewrote the institutions, gave the process the name it now carries, and set the organs and bodies in a frame called the Andean Integration System.

Law that arrives without a national vote

What the members joined is a legal order rather than a schedule of tariff cuts. Decisions of the Commission and of the Andean Council of Foreign Ministers are published in the Official Gazette of the Cartagena Agreement and are in force in the four member countries from that publication, with no act of a national parliament in between. The attributes the Court of Justice states for that order are immediate applicability, direct effect and primacy, and primacy is asserted over national norms of any rank, constitutional provisions included. A national norm that conflicts with an Andean one is not struck down: the member country leaves it unapplied.

The Court sits in Quito, on the fifteenth floor of an office tower on Avenida 12 de Octubre. It has one magistrate for each member country and a presidency that rotates annually. It hears actions of nullity against Decisions and Resolutions, actions of non-compliance against member countries, and appeals for failure to act; it answers referrals from national judges by preliminary interpretation; and it holds an arbitral function and a labour jurisdiction over the staff of the system's own institutions.

What an associate member is, and is not

Article 136 sets one condition before the Council of Foreign Ministers, meeting in expanded session, can grant the status: the country has to have concluded a free trade agreement with the member countries. Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay applied as parties to Mercosur and were admitted by Decision 613, adopted at Lima on 7 July 2005. Chile, which had signed in 1969 and left in 1976, was admitted as an associate in 2006.

Decision 613 is specific about what follows. An associate may be invited into a meeting of an organ of the Andean Integration System, at the organ's initiative or on request, but the member countries have to approve both the attendance and the agenda, and the meeting then runs in two sessions, the first of them among the member countries alone. Associates adhere to the Additional Protocol to the Cartagena Agreement on the Andean Commitment to Democracy and to the Andean Charter for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. Their trade with the member countries runs on the economic complementation agreements registered under the 1980 Montevideo Treaty, numbered 36, 58 and 59, rather than on the common external tariff.

Beyond the two tiers sits a third that carries no obligations at all. The Community's own register lists Spain, Morocco, Türkiye, Greece, Panama, the Dominican Republic and China as observer countries.

The catalogue files 9 countries under this group, which is the two tiers of membership counted together. The Community's own register names Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as member countries and Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay as associate countries, and the grid below does not draw that line.

Leaving, and the five years afterwards

Article 135 makes the exit short and the tail long. A member country that wishes to denounce the agreement notifies the Commission, and from that moment the rights and obligations of membership cease, with one exception: the advantages received and granted under the Liberalisation Programme stay in force for five years from the denunciation, a period the Commission may shorten at the departing country's request. Venezuela gave that notice on 22 April 2006. The five years ran out on 22 April 2011, and Decision 746 of 27 April 2011 kept the tariff preferences on Venezuelan goods running provisionally until bilateral agreements replaced them.

Chile is the same treaty read the other way. A signatory of 1969 that withdrew in 1976 sits on the register today, in a different column.

What membership looks like in a hand

Two Decisions adopted at Valencia on 22 June 2001 put the group into a pocket. Decision 503 admits the nationals of any member country to any other as tourists on presentation of a valid national identification document, with no consular visa, and lists the accepted documents country by country: identity cards, voter registration cards, border passes, birth certificates for young children. Decision 504 created the Andean Passport as a common model. The specification is exact. The booklet measures 88 by 125 millimetres with rounded corners, the cover is wine coloured with gold lettering, the words ANDEAN COMMUNITY are centred across the top, and the national coat of arms and the official name of the issuing country sit below them.

The mountains the name comes from

The highest ground of three member countries stands in the cordillera: Huascarán in Peru at 6,768 metres, Nevado Sajama in Bolivia at 6,542 metres, Chimborazo in Ecuador at 6,263 metres. Colombia's does not. Pico Cristóbal Colón reaches 5,775 metres in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an isolated massif standing back from the Caribbean coast and detached from the Andean chain. Among the associates the name fits Argentina and Chile, whose highest points are Aconcagua at 6,962 metres and Ojos del Salado at 6,893 metres, and stops there: Pico da Neblina in Brazil reaches 2,994 metres, Cerro Tres Kandú in Paraguay 842 metres, and Cerro Catedral in Uruguay 514 metres.