By Allan Wagner Tizón, Secretary General of the Andean Community
Article published in the newspapers, Portafolio (Colombia) (04.17.2006), La Razón (Bolivia) (04.18.2006) and El Comercio (Lima) (04.18.2006)

The Andean Community’s thirty-seventh anniversary that we will be celebrating this coming May offers a favorable opportunity for taking stock of its accomplishments and of the challenges it faces.  

The strong institutions with which the process has been endowed, and which set it apart from other regional integration processes, have enabled Community Decisions and legislation to maintain their validity and their preeminence over agreements with third parties.  In this way, the Andean integration process is being consolidated as a favorable scenario for the Member Countries’ participation in the world economy and, at the same time, is being reinforced as a vehicle for deepening the economic, political and social ties among them.    

Furthermore, thanks to the decisions made by the Presidents at the Quirama, Quito and Lima summits, Andean integration today has a multidimensional agenda that has retrieved the development perspective for the Community project and that is moving ahead with strategies for cooperation in key areas like energy, the environment and social cohesion, with the active participation of key actors, among them medium, small and micro business, local governments, national businessmen, trade unions, and social networks on the subregion’s most varied expressions.

Despite these important accomplishments, it must be acknowledged that we are still experiencing difficulties in advancing the tasks involved in the enlarged market and in building the consensuses that are needed to construct a common policy for our foreign relations.   These difficulties are an expression not only of the different approaches as to the best way to guide our countries’ development, but also of their varying resource endowments and production systems.  All of this, in turn, is reflected in visible differences over the valuing and nature of our relations with third countries that would make our participation in the world economy more beneficial to our nations. 

I am convinced that this new impasse requires, as in other equally challenging periods, the active cooperation of the Presidents, in order to revitalize the Community consensus on integration as the coordinating link between our countries’ socially inclusive development and participation in the world economy and, at the same time, as a vehicle for the plural convergence of different national expectations.  Therein lies the importance of President Evo Morales’ call for a meeting of Andean Presidents to coordinate common positions in preparation for the European Union – Latin American Summit to be held this May in Vienna.  This meeting will give us an exceptional opportunity to resume our dialogue, set aside differences and return to the path of concerted action.

I also believe that this moment of transcendental definitions calls for full participation by the different economic, political, and social actors in the debate on the future of the integration process.  To contribute to this end, the General Secretariat of the Andean Community and the Office of the Mayor of Medellín, with the support of the European Union and the Government of the Republic of Korea, have convened the High-Level Forum ‘Building an Andean Community of Citizens’ that will be held in Medellín on April 24 and 25. 

The Medellín Forum is in line with the renewed presence of cities and regions in the Andean Integration system and, in particular, constitutes the recognition of a metropolitan area of Colombia that is outstanding for having put into play a plural project for the construction of citizenship, in which the participation of the different social actors is foremost, with active cooperation between the public and private sectors, for achieving comprehensive and sustainable local development. 

Dialogue at all levels among the actors in the integration process is the best antidote against uncertainty and the most expeditious course for advancing the mandate for unity bequeathed to us by the Libertador.