With a one-hour delay, leaders from 12 South American countries initiated their participation in the 6th BRICS Summit. A couple of minutes before the session started, President Dilma Rousseff stated that the plan was to reproduce the model of the meeting as it happened in South Africa. “We held the meeting with African countries and we’ll do it here with countries from USAN, which is also key to the relationship with BRICS,” she explained.

The work session, which had its doors closed, created a favorable environment in which leaders from Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia, to name a few, were able to voice their urges and top-priority demands. Another benefit brought by the meeting was the mitigation of possible anxieties caused by rumors according to which Brazil was moving further and further away from its continent and prioritizing negotiations with the bloc, whose members are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

South American countries, for instance, are not likely to be directly benefited by the chief strategy approved by the summit, namely the creation of the BRICS Development Bank, announced in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, which is only expected to make an impact on the South American nations in the long run.

“The bank hasn’t even been founded yet,” Rousseff noted. “We’ll always see our loans with much generosity. They’ll be granted with the standards of good management. No one is to [lend] money indiscriminately, nor is this the role of BRICS’s bank. Indeed, [the bank] is the reflection of a more multi-polar world,” the president declared.

In practice, the operations of the bank should have no immediate effect even on the bloc itself, since loans will only be available in two years’ time, after parliaments from each of the four countries approve the institution’s creation and norms.

On Thursday (Jul 17), the event will expand its scope beyond the South American nations, thus including representatives from the CELAC Quartet (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States): Chile, Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba and Costa Rica.