Address by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia, Guillermo Fernández de Soto, at the opening ceremony of the Special Meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Andean Community
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, January 28, 2002

We have gathered in Santa Cruz to define the future of our integration. The mandate issued by the Presidents at their recent meeting in Lima leaves no room for doubt about the matter.

We are here, of course, to do a serious and transparent job that will enable us to plan the very future of the Community, to set the course the countries wish for consolidating it as an important group in both the hemisphere and the world, and to give it an international projection.

Colombia is convinced that Andean integration is the best possible strategy for obtaining a positive part to play in the globalized world. For that reason, it will continue to wager, as it has since 1969, when this formidable effort was launched in Colombia, on the consolidation of our subregion and also on defining a new course for it, on giving it a new air, as occurred in Cartagena de Indias. The fact is that in spite of the difficulties, the results that have been obtained over the past decade reveal that the benefits gained from this process are greater than if we did not have a vehicle such as the Andean Community of Nations, which we ourselves have defined and given a course and a clearly established mission of what our integration should be in the future.

Colombia also deems it vital to endow the Community with its own synergy capable of generating a momentum that will serve the needs of the integration process and not the individual interests of the countries and, on many occasions, of short-term domestic situations, and likewise enable it to surmount any failures in compliance by each and every one of us. In that way, we can restore the credibility of our integration process and continue to move ahead firmly toward the attainment of the different targets we have set ourselves for the development of the pillars on which our Community rests: the political dimension, the Common Market, the common foreign policy, the social and integration agendas and border development.

For those reasons, Colombia proposes that we start to consolidate a political agenda that will include different topics related to these four pillars, in which the political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of integration are in better balance, and that is given independence on matters of trade. Only in this way will we be able to also give the Andean Community meaning and to arrive at a politically mature process that will allow us to strengthen the other pillars.

We also propose that the private sector and civil society take part in the construction of the Community as basic actors. It is, therefore, necessary to promote the creation of new scenarios in which businessmen and citizens can express their vision of the future, while contributing strategically toward achieving the cherished dream of integration.

For that reason, I wish to draw attention with satisfaction to the meeting of the Business Advisory Council that was held yesterday and whose results will provide basic material for the work we start today.

The more the production sector and society in general support integration policies, the better chance there will be of positive results in their implementation and that the governments will not back out from what has already been agreed.

Insofar as the consolidation of the Andean economic space is concerned, my country is committed to the perfecting of the Free Trade Area and the establishment of the Customs Union. Only in the degree to which we move ahead with those intentions, without delaying their technical aspects and showing a sincere will to do so, will we be able to progress toward the formation of a Common Market in 2005.

For that reason, Colombia maintains its position regarding the need to adopt a Common External Tariff that would enter into full operation in the second half of this year, not only to strengthen our subregional integration process, but because it would certainly be impossible otherwise to cope with the international negotiations that we have underway and in particular the negotiation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

In addition, and as an extension to the perfecting of the economic space, it is also essential to comprehensively adopt a common agricultural policy. This would create the framework for settling differences in Andean trade in agricultural goods based on the Community operation of a price stabilization system that we ourselves would design.

We should also continue to advance toward harmonizing our macroeconomic policies on the basis of and with criteria such as convergence, the establishment of targets moving toward single-digit inflation –a decision already made by our Presidents in Cartagena de Indias--, fiscal reconvergence, and a sustainable public debt in the Andean countries, among other aspects.

In the case of our foreign policy, it is necessary to define a strategically designed course of action from a comprehensive Community outlook. The common foreign policy cannot be limited exclusively to trade aspects and to the interests of the member countries. On the contrary, globalization, as it has become defined following the events of September 11, makes it necessary for us to be able to give true importance to some issues on the world agenda, in which we are all interested because it affects us all, and which should henceforth become a priority of Andean foreign policy.

Along this same line, concerted efforts and a consensus are needed with regard to challenges that arise for the Community in its foreign relations, as in the cases of the FTAA and the World Trade Organization already mentioned; also in its relations with the Mercosur and the consolidation of a South American free trade area. If we really want to move ahead in defining and resolving matters such as the world drug problem, a strategic association with the European Union will be essential, together with the contribution of our own experience to the creation of the new international financial architecture that we have been asking for for some years now.

Today we have the enormous privilege of meeting together with ministers who are competent in the different areas of integration, in keeping with the mandate our Presidents issued at their meeting in Lima. This gathering, which could appear to be merely symbolic, is not. It is intended, as that Act itself stipulates, to identify clearly and with transparency where the problems lie and also how we can move ahead with concrete results toward consolidating our Community and telling each other what it is that we expect from it. In this undertaking, both the methodology to be used at this meeting and the strategy for the future that we define in it will be fundamental.

La agenda that these days of work –these hours of work before our Presidents arrive-- hold in store for us will undoubtedly be definitive in allowing us to fulfill the objectives, not only of our governments, but also of our people, of our production sectors, of our civil society which, as always, looks with hope, but also with a measure of skepticism, at what today and tomorrow and the next day may bring in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

Obtaining our union is, therefore, our present imperative. Consolidating our subregional integration process politically, commercially, and trade-wise and, above all, defining our capacity for positioning ourselves positively in the international system, is the most important challenge we have had to face in recent years.

Creating a Community vision in these areas is not easy, but it is not impossible. My country invites you, starting today, to work with us in defining and confronting that challenge, which in the end is the basic and priority purpose of Andean integration.

Thank you very much.