Brazil, Peru to build bridge toward trade deal

Reuters-Forbes.com, 04.11.03, 7:21 PM ET

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil and Peru agreed Friday to build a bridge linking the two countries and to cooperate more in the battle against drug trafficking as they work toward a free trade pact.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, who led a delegation of ministers on an official visit to Brazil, said he hoped the two countries could draw up a free trade pact before Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visits Lima in June.

"We have taken the decision to enter into this strategic alliance and break 180 years of being connected by the Amazon and other parts of our frontier and not facing each other," Toledo told reporters after meetings with Lula.

Despite years of talks to draw up a trade agreement between the Mercosur trade bloc and the Andean Nations Community, negotiators have failed to produce a deal. Mercosur includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, while the Andean Nations Community groups Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Toledo and Lula also signed an agreement to build a 160-yard bridge over the Acre River from the Brazilian city of Assis Brasil to Inapari in Peru by 2004.

Apart from its obvious symbolic value, the bridge could increase trade between the two countries, which totaled $653 million in 2002, and provide a route for Brazilian goods to get to the Pacific.

Brazil also agreed to give Peru "progressive access" to information from Brazil's System for the Vigilance of the Amazon, a web of radar, control towers and spy planes that monitor drug and wood trafficking across the vast fluvial basin.