With the signing on January 17 of the European Union (EU)–Mercosur Association Agreement and of the EU–Mexico Modernised Global Agreement on 22 May, the year 2026 will go down in history as the year in which the long cycle of the “Marín strategy”, launched more than three decades ago, was brought to a close. In the early 1990s, when the EU was laying the foundations of its newly established Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), Manuel Marín, then Vice-President of the European Commission, argued that the objective of the EU’s policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) should be the negotiation and eventual establishment of Association Agreements (AAs) with the countries and regional integration groupings taking shape in the region. These AAs would be composed of three main “pillars”: 1) Political dialogue, providing a framework for regular meetings between the parties at different levels and on a range of issues, some sectoral and others political; 2) Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), consisting of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements (IPPAs); and 3) Cooperation, providing a framework for bilateral and regional programmes on matters of common interest, such as education and the environment. This institution-building agenda proved attractive to the governments of Latin American and Caribbean countries, as it provided external mechanisms that reinforced their national processes of democratisation, structural economic reform and regional integration. The process, summarised in Table 1, began with the launch of negotiations with Mexico in 1995 and concluded with the summit held with that same country on 22 May 2026. The Marín cycle has come to an end.
The significance of the signing of these two agreements extends far beyond the specific provisions contained in each of them. Today, after three decades of negotiations, the EU has Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with every state in the Americas, with the exception of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia1 and the United States. A transatlantic space of economic partnerships unprecedented in both its geographical scope and degree of liberalisation has therefore been completed, as it includes modern disciplines, such as digital trade and government procurement, which could not be advanced to the same extent within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO). These agreements also encompass mechanisms to protect and promote investment, which may be an even more important component of the European presence in Latin America than trade, an area in which the EU has been overtaken by China. In addition, the EPAs are accompanied by frameworks for bilateral and bi-regional political dialogue, as well as by the EU’s Global Gateway strategy, which supports private-sector productive projects in the region aimed at promoting environmental and social sustainability through cooperation funds and guarantees provided by the European Investment Bank (EIB).
Neither the United States nor China, the region’s other two most important partners, enjoys such broad, deep and comprehensively regulated access to these markets, nor do they possess such institutionalised mechanisms for political dialogue and cooperation. Indeed, following the disappearance of USAID in 2026, US development cooperation has virtually vanished, leaving the EU as the region’s most important partner in this field, followed at a considerable distance by Japan. In short, these are agreements whose economic core is fundamental, but which also encompass other key dimensions of Euro–Latin American relations.
It is evident that, by completing the institutionalisation of their relations, these two regions intend to send two political signals to the major powers. On the one hand, the EU and LAC are responding to the trade policy of the Trump administration in the United States, which since April 2025 has undermined the principles upon which the multilateral trading system had been built. They share an interest in protecting rules-based economic exchange, as their development depends upon it, and they need to promote the diversification of their external relations, given their considerable dependence on the United States and China, whose rivalry risks trapping them in an increasingly polarised international environment.
On the other hand, and in this context, the EU is giving concrete substance to its “geopolitical turn” by accelerating the conclusion of these two EPAs, which had been stalled on the negotiating table for years. Indeed, it is no coincidence that their finalisation comes in the same wave as other agreements with India and Australia, with which work had also been ongoing for some time. In order to conclude them, the EU has had to set aside its longstanding agricultural objections and relax or delay the implementation of certain environmental measures, such as the Deforestation Regulation, known by its acronym EUDR. In this way, in order to move forward with the establishment of rules that facilitate access to new markets and to certain critical raw materials, the Commission has had to fight hard internal battles and make several strategic U-turns. Thus, European trade policy, traditionally more rigid and marked by clear red lines, is being transformed into an economic foreign policy, in line with the Draghi Report of 2024, driven by more strategic ambitions aimed at projecting EU power and therefore requiring greater agility.
For the countries of Mercosur and Mexico, the timing of the signing of these EPAs also sends important signals. In the case of Mexico, engaged in a review of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) (which promises, in the best case, to drag on indefinitely or, in the worst case, to end in the agreement’s abrogation), leveraging the agreement with the EU is highly opportune, given that the urgency of diversifying access to other markets is becoming increasingly pressing. In addition to the new disciplines and geographical indications included, the new investor–state dispute settlement mechanism, which is more permanent and transparent, is perhaps the most important element of the “modernised” EPA, as it should, in theory, serve as an incentive to attract European investment, which the Mexican economy urgently needs at present. However, the significance of the summit held in Mexico City on 22 May goes far beyond the economic dimension: it marks the resumption of a political dialogue that had been progressively de-institutionalised in recent years, as no summit had been held since 2015. Looking ahead, it is to be expected that the sectoral dialogues abandoned in recent years will be resumed, including that on the environment, in order to accompany the Global Gateway projects already announced in this field.
In the case of Mercosur, the economic significance of the agreement is much greater than in the Mexican case, as this bloc had so far been relatively little integrated into international trade through FTAs, having only such agreements with Israel (2007), Egypt (2020), Palestine (2011), Singapore (2023) and, more recently, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), comprising Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway (2025). The EPA with the EU is therefore the first with a major economy. It required titanic efforts from both sides to overcome the resistance that had blocked it for more than 30 years: the protectionism of Brazilian industry and European agriculture had to give way. It can be assumed that this would not have been possible without the sense of urgency created by the current geopolitical situation. For Brazil, it is essential to strengthen access to the European market in order to reduce its dependence on China, which buys only raw materials, and to find partners for projects that contribute to the protection of the Amazon. For Argentina, the EPA represents a mechanism that consolidates the current economic opening and, as in the case of Uruguay and Paraguay, opens up new markets and sources of investment.
The new cycle that is now beginning is not defined by a grand, ambitious strategy such as the one once proposed by Marín, when liberal consensus brought the two regions together around a shared vision, but rather by a more modest agenda: preserving what has been built and deepening it where possible. As I explained in a more detailed discussion paper published by the EU-LAC Foundation in 2025, there are already ideas for further unlocking the enormous economic potential represented by the fact that the EU and almost the entire American continent are linked by next-generation EPAs: one could deepen rules of origin cumulation across some of these agreements, as well as the trade facilitation and customs acceleration agenda through the use of new technologies. A bi-regional technical committee could be created to coordinate the monitoring of the committees established under each agreement and to identify areas of opportunity.
But for this to happen, it is necessary for the political relationship to continue operating regularly, for the committees to meet, and for interest in counterpart countries to be maintained across a majority of member states. This is perhaps the most significant challenge, as geopolitical tensions encourage fragmentation on both sides of the Atlantic, while polarisation and populism make decision-making and government formation within states more difficult. Latin America and the Caribbean face the aggressive “Donroe Doctrine”, a real threat of unilateral use of force that affects and intimidates more than one government in the region and may discourage the EU from taking a more assertive role as an economic, political and strategic partner of Latin America and the Caribbean.
[1] Bolivia is in the process of joining Mercosur and it is likely that, once it becomes a full member, it will have to sign up to the EU-Mercosur Economic Partnership Agreement.
The opinions expressed in this blog are exclusively those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the EU-LAC Foundation.