ABSTRACT
Still in the early 1980s, notwithstanding declamatory pronouncements by Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela in favor of general and complete disarmament, these countries were the main forces behind the regional arms race. For decades “Argentina's active participation in disarmament and arms limitation proposals [was] in strong contradiction with its policy toward actual agreements.” 1 But Argentina was not the only country with an ambiguous discourse. Until the mid-1990s neither Argentina nor Brazil nor Chile had signed and ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Nor had the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (Treaty of Tlatelolco) fully entered into force in those countries. One of the explanations for this ambiguity was that no state in the Southern Cone was willing to be the first to sign an agreement that would bind it while not binding its neighbors. Rivalry and competition have been a constant in the relational pattern of the region.
