It is not often that a country pulls out of an international organisation of which it is the host. Yet that is what Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, did on March 13th. Ecuador joined six other countries who have withdrawn from the South American Union (Unasur), a talking shop which once included all 12 of the continent’s nations, criticising it for the “perverse politicking of the self-styled 21st-century socialists”. For good measure he said he wants his country to repossess Unasur’s gleaming, cantilevered $65m headquarters near Quito, opened in 2014 and paid for by his predecessor, Rafael Correa, calling it “an ode to waste”. He wants to turn it into a university for indigenous people.
Mr Moreno is among several South American presidents who may go to Santiago on March 22nd to launch a replacement for Unasur called Prosur. This is a brainchild of Iván Duque, Colombia’s new conservative president, and his Chilean counterpart, Sebastián Piñera, of the centre-right. Unveiling the idea in January, Mr Duque said that rather than a bureaucratic organisation, Prosur will be a “co-ordination mechanism” supporting democracy and the market economy. Mr Piñera has invited all but one of the 12 countries. The exception is Venezuela.