Venezuela joins Mercosur and Chavez buys Brazilian aircraft

Yesterday president Dilma Rousseff and president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela signed a contract for the sale of Embraer airplanes. Venezuela will buy six aircraft at a cost of around $270 million, with an option for an additional fourteen. The whole deal could be worth as much as $900 million.

Under the terms of the contracts, Venezuela’s state-owned airline company, Conviasa, will get its first Embraer 190AR in September and another two by December. These are passenger planes with a capacity that varies from 98 to 114 seats.

After the aircraft deal was closed, a formal ceremony took place to mark the admittance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), where it joined Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (Paraguay, where the president was impeached in June, has been suspended until April 2013, when new elections are scheduled to take place). The presidents of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, and José Pepe Mujica of Uruguay, along with Dilma Rousseff and Hugo Chavez, participated in the ceremony.

Dilma Rousseff then hosted a lunch at the Foreign Ministry (“Itamaraty”) for the Mercosur presidents who were present.

With Venezuela, Mercosur will now have a population of 270 million (70% of the population of South America), a GDP of $3.3 trillion (83% of the GDP of South America) and cover an area of 12.7 million square kilometers (72% of the area of South America).