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Latin American and Caribbean nations have agreed to create a new alliance that would exclude regional neighbors United States and Canada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said at a summit on Tuesday.
The new bloc "must as a priority push for regional integration... and promote the regional agenda in global meetings," Calderon told participants from 32 nations, including 24 leaders, at the end of the two-day summit in the beach resort of Cancun.
The new grouping was expected to serve as an alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the North American neighbors and has been the main forum for regional affairs in the past half-century.
Its status, name and organizational structure will be decided on at a meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, next year, Calderon said.
The decision to form the new group was taken as the Cancun summit between the Rio Group and Caribbean Community (Caricom) nations ended Tuesday.
It was a move away from the traditional influence of the United States in the region, and was promoted by regional heavyweights Brazil and Mexico.
Summit participants also united behind Argentina in a dispute over British drilling for oil around the Falkland Islands.
The summit declared "support to the legitimate rights of the Argentine Republic in the sovereignty dispute with the United Kingdom," Calderon said.
After losing a short but bloody war over the south Atlantic islands with Britain in 1982, Argentina is furious over drilling operations which began Monday in the potentially rich seabed around the archipelago.
Argentina says London has violated UN resolutions calling on the parties to take no actions that could aggravate their dispute.
Cuban President Raul Castro was meanwhile one of the first to laud the new regional bloc as a historic move toward "the constitution of a purely Latin American and Caribbean regional organization."
Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962 and, although the body last year voted to readmit the communist island, it has not yet complied with conditions to return to the Washington-based body.
US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela said Monday that the United States did not see the new grouping as a problem.
"This should not be an effort that would replace the OAS," Valenzuela said.
The decision to create a new regional group came amid a fractious left-right divide, and followed a clash Monday between leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe during a lunch.
The region is still struggling for consensus in the aftermath of last June's military-backed coup in Honduras, in which president Manuel Zelaya was toppled.
Porfirio Lobo, who was elected as Honduras's president in voting held under a de facto regime in November, was not present at the summit, and many countries still question his legitimacy.
The new body was expected to include Honduras however and will have a total of 33 nations.
