Latin American and Caribbean nations should aspire to a bloc like the European Union, Mexico's president and other leaders said at a summit on Saturday, in a bid to wrest influence away from the Washington-based Organisation of American States (OAS).

For years, a few of the region's leftist standard-bearers who attended the gathering of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) have viewed the OAS as too close to the United States, resenting, in particular, its exclusion of Cuba from its members states.

The host of Saturday's summit, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, told more than a dozen presidents and prime ministers at the opening ceremony that such a revamped diplomatic body could better boost the region's inequality-stricken economies as well as...