SOUTH AMERICA: South American leaders from Venezuela to Argentina are proposing to build the world's largest fuel pipeline across Latin America, and they hope it will deliver much more than natural gas: they portray the plan as the first blueprint for a new era of regional co-operation, greater independence from international markets and a more prominent voice on the world stage.
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has labelled the proposal a 8,000km (5,000 mile) symbol of diminishing US influence in Latin America.
Enthusiastic support from regional heavyweights, including Brazil and Argentina, has prompted others to describe the project as the first true joint venture of a political coalition determined to forge a new South American identity.
"This is the end of the Washington consensus," Mr Chavez said in Caracas last month, using the term for the market-driven economic policies that many Latin American countries adopted in the 1990s with US encouragement. "It's the beginning of a South American consensus."
But the pipeline is a long way from being built, and many potential obstacles - finding the estimated $20 billion to pay for it, resolving the environmental concerns of burrowing through the Amazon rainforest, dealing with the competing interests of individual nations - have caused some analysts to wonder whether the public pledges of unity can withstand a concrete test.
Instead of illustrating the ideological solidarity of the region, some analysts say that the pipeline proposal could expose the political fault lines that divide participating countries.
"This is a region that is moving toward more disintegration and political fragmentation - not the other way around," said Michael Shifter, of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based group concerned with Latin America.
According to preliminary proposals, the pipeline would begin in Puerto Ordaz, southeast of Caracas, stretch south the length of Brazil and end in Argentina, with possible branches serving Uruguay and Bolivia.
In the past four years, the five countries have elected presidents who seek to promote more regional teamwork and less dependence on international financial markets.
Energy-related issues have been instrumental in determining the outcomes of several of those elections, in some cases serving as a lightning rod for public discontent.
President Chavez, thanks to record profits in Venezuela's oil and gas industries, has become the continent's most-prominent voice and most-active alliance-builder, using fuel to barter trade deals with Latin American neighbours and to secure good will.
In Bolivia, disputes over how to manage natural gas reserves toppled two presidents in the past two years and helped propel the rise of Evo Morales, a socialist who has vowed to increase state control of the sector, to the presidency.
The countries with the region's largest economies, Brazil and Argentina, are struggling to keep up with rising domestic demand for natural gas and are eager to make deals with ideological allies to preserve flows.
The three principal authors of the pipeline plan - Mr Chavez, and presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina - promise more details next month, when they meet for discussions in Argentina. Each has good reasons for wanting the project to progress quickly.
Energy experts say designing and building the project would be an enormously challenging task, but could be done within seven years with adequate financing.
But there still remain environmental problems. To cross Brazil, the pipeline would have to traverse the Amazon, home to 25 per cent of the world's plant species and numerous indigenous communities.
Nowhere in South America is the potential for tensions greater than in Bolivia, which has the continent's second-largest gas reserves after Venezuela.
Bolivia, which borders Brazil and Argentina, could become the most convenient source of gas for both, although the proposed pipeline would carry Venezuelan gas into direct competition with Bolivia, South America's poorest nation.
Recent events in other parts of Latin America suggest that the current atmosphere of unity could dissolve into a conflict over national interests.
"Economically, you do see some room for pragmatic deals," Mr Shifter said. "But there are lots of splits, divisions and jealousies in the region now."
Mr Chavez is the motor driving the pipeline, he said, "and clearly he has some constituency in Latin America, but I don't think a lot of people in other countries are looking to copy his style". - (LA Times-Washington Post service)