Lima, May 9, 2006.- The Secretary General of the Andean Community, Ambassador Allan Wagner Tizón, travels today to Vienna, Austria, where he will take part in the Fourth Summit of Heads of State and of Government of the European Union and of Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held from Thursday the 11th to Saturday the 13th of this month in that European capital.

Ambassador Wagner plans to meet with European authorities to examine courses of action that will make it possible to continue moving toward an association agreement between the CAN and the EU, and to coordinate matters in this connection with the Andean delegations attending the event. 

In a letter sent last Friday to the Andean countries, Ambassador Allan Wagner proposed that the Foreign Ministers of the five countries hold a meeting in Vienna to study the CAN’s situation and define actions for reaching the best possible solutions to the organization’s current problems.

"This could lead to the meeting of Andean Presidents that the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has been pushing for,” Wagner pointed out. 

The most important issues to be taken up at this Fourth Summit, which will be reflected in the Declaration of the Heads of State and Government in Vienna, are democracy and human rights, strengthening multilateralism, fighting terrorism, drugs and organized crime, the environment, energy, and growth and employment, together with association, regional integration, trade, and interconnection (investment, infrastructure, the information society) agreements; the anti-poverty effort and cooperation for development; immigration and shared knowledge. 

A working meeting of Foreign Ministers on Thursday afternoon will touch off the planned events in Vienna, to be followed on Friday by the Summit of Heads of State and of Government of the EU and LAC.  Saturday has been reserved for regional summits, with meetings to be held between the European troika (Austria, Finland and the European Commission) and the subregional groups.    

The EU-LAC Summits play an important part in the relations between the two regions.  The last summit, held in Guadalajara, Mexico on May 28 and 29, 2004 and attended by the recently enlarged EU (to 25 members) gave a stronger boost to biregional dialogue and addressed the issue of social cohesion, among other matters.