CITIES OF THE UNITED STATES OF LATIN AMERICA (USLA)

"There is a dream that moves the neighbours of our region, and that is the dream of Latin American integration," says Sherban Leonardo Cretoiu, a professor at the Fundac~ao Dom Cabral, a prestigious business school in Brazil.

This dream would have been familiar to the region's leaders almost two centuries ago, when, inspired by broadly shared liberal republican values, its countries began to shake off European rule. But now, the region's few micro-regional trading agreements and a larger political economic project remain fractured because of widely varying ideological standpoints.