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subconsciously we tend to phonetically use our mother tongue phonetics when communicating using other romanic languages and dialects.

Yup. The "posh" word for that is transference; you transfer features from all varieties that you speak into each other. It isn't exclusive to Romance varieties, it's just that among Romance languages you can get away transferring more stuff (as there's a good chance that the feature in question also exists in the target language).

This gets interesting in Shakira's Portuguese, because she is not transferring a few Spanish features into Portuguese, even if she could theoretically do so, and still pass as a native. A quick example of that would be how she pronounces "determinante" with [tʃi], even if plenty Portuguese speakers would use [te] instead, as you would in Spanish.

I guess that the question is if to be considered a proficient speaker of a specific language, do you need to loose all traits of a foreign accent?

It depends, really. There isn't a single answer. For some, full proficiency is to speak a language as native speakers would; for others it's just about being able to communicate with other speakers (native or not) efficiently.

Personally I'd consider the Swedish speakers from your example as fully proficient, as long as they're able to communicate what they want.

Yeah, I don't mean to downplay her effort. She did say in her Portuguese interview that she learned it "in a month when she was 18" which was pretty much my experience learning a bit of French a few years back which I can mostly read after passively absorbing the grammar. It feels like reading Spanish for the most part.

Native speakers of a romance language are already at "occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news" level or better for other romance languages, without having to study them at all. They simply share a lot of words amongst themselves. Becoming decently conversational in a few months is not an exaggeration.

Oh, not exaggerating at all. I can read quite a bit of Portuguese because it's quite similar to Spanish and also French because I learned some grammar. It's very much like reading German for English speakers. It can be tricky, but if you get the hang of mapping out some words between the two languages, it becomes much easier than it seems.

I think they were more referring to how knowing Spanish, a Latin-based language, can help in learning another Latin-based languages.

English is primarily Germanic-based so it falls out of the category for the most part.

What helped me was Michael Thomas's method for learning French. I literally played the CD once back in college and most of it stuck because the grammar is similar to Spanish and he makes it easy to learn. French vocabulary is a bit of a guessing game but it's easier once you get the hang of it. You should give it a try, it only takes like a couple of days of passive listening.