In 2007 it was “porque no te callas”, now it’s “vete al carajo”. At the Rio Summit earlier this week, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez shared a few choice words of love and respect.

From the New Yorker

President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, who seems to equate masculinity with an archaic code of honor, uttered the phrase, which translates as “Act like a man!” with studly connotations of challenge and defiance attached. His neighbor, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, shouted back in his standard street-fighter mode, “¡Vete al carajo!”—or, roughly, “Go fuck yourself.”

And really that’s all par for the course between those two, but the bigger “vete pal carajo” went to the U.S. and Canada who were excluded when Latin America leaders decided to form a regional organisation that will unite the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean but that will not involve either the United States or Canada.

Billed as an alternative to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), the new group will but more distance between the hemisphere’s Spanish and Portuguese speaking nations and the English-speaking nations in the north. The organisation, is tentatively called Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.

The Organization of American States (OAS), has been criticized for its ineffectiveness in dealing with the recent coup in Honduras and for the perception that it is dominated by U.S. interests. Mexican President Felipe Calderon suggested that the new organization could counter the OAS.

The organization still has to establish rules and that may be the hard part. There is a huge difference among the politics of Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela and differences in terms of the power that the United States wields inside those countries.

Via / The Christian Science Monitor