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

I would first like to warmly welcome you on behalf of the people of Bolivia before turning to the issues to be addressed by this Meeting. We are both proud and satisfied that this meeting that is so important to the life of the Andean Community is being held here in Bolivia, in Santa Cruz, a region that is directly and closely associated with the outlook for our integration process.

This is a special working meeting, and I think it is important to point this out before we begin. The structure of this meeting and the way it was convened are not normal Community practice, but the fact is that the circumstances so counseled. And that is why the Presidents asked us to meet this way on these days, to prepare the work that they are to examine at their Meeting, which will be opened on Wednesday. This meeting, therefore, is a special working meeting whose purpose is to draw up the agenda and to propose to the Presidents the political decisions the Ministers deem advisable with regard to the progress of our integration effort.

The history of the Andean Community is, at heart, the most genuine representation of the process of Latin American integration. It is a chronicle that demonstrates the immense potential for cooperation that exists among our countries and that reveals the tensions that have periodically arisen in regard to the idea of association and of economic, cultural and political complementarity among our nations, while showing the international community the inflexible intention of our countries to confront and resolve our problems. This is certainly not the first crisis to erupt in Andean integration; there have been other and more important crises and the countries always showed spirit in facing up to and resolving those problems.

The resolving of these problems is the result not only of the political manifestation of the governments –which in this act is far more emphatic than on previous occasions--, but of the people’s mandate, the mandate of our peoples to become integrated and this is a mandate that our leaders must always heed. It is the will of the nations, and not only of their governments, to not give in to our difficulties.

We have once again been put to the test. What we have built up over these long years in the Andean Community appears to be on the brink of collapsing. We were able through almost thirty years of efforts to build a Free Trade Area that had not existed earlier. Today, the trade among our countries generates more than six billion dollars. I can remember sitting in the offices of the Andean Community at the Crillón Hotel in Lima when we first started in 1969 –with Javier here, who can corroborate this— and the region’s total trade amounted to barely a hundred million dollars. The radical change in the commercial and economic interlinkage of our region is the first part of our countries’ mandate. This Area must be safeguarded, it must be consolidated and it must be projected into the future.

While we put our efforts to work in the areas of cooperation and trade, we cannot overlook the huge undertaking of building up a financial instrument without parallel in the Americas: the Andean Development Corporation. Born with the regional integration movement as a small financial cooperative into which the countries deposited their meager resources and sought to share them, it has now become Latin America’s most important financial instrument.

The CAF’s loans, clearances and disbursements are now in the region of three billion dollars, widely surpassing the contribution of the other financing institutions in the Andean countries. The sums approved by the Andean Corporation are far larger than those of the IDB, the World Bank and all other financial organizations in the Andean countries. This success is one of our most important assets. But our assets –the commercial, the financial, and that of the cultural and political cooperation we have built up over these long years— are now at serious risk.

That was the conclusion reached by the Presidents at the Iberian-American Summit in Lima, when they requested that we Foreign Ministers convene a meeting of this kind, in light of our stark analysis of the risks that were being generated within the Andean Community –risks born, it is true, of a long, severe and dangerous international crisis of three to four years’ standing, which shows no immediate signs of abating, given the existing circumstances in the international economy.

The Presidents asked us at that time to remain calm, yet firm, in facing up to the problems of the Andean Community and to examine them clearly and with transparency, in order to carefully get to their very roots and resolve them, instead of merely making political declarations that would give the impression that the problems had been settled, while they continued to grow and poison our trading and political relations.

It is obvious that there are tensions in the trading relations between our countries and that we are not taking sufficient advantage of the potential for cooperation that is available to us. That is why we have chosen this structure for our meeting; it is essentially political, but of course the conclusions of the Presidents must have firm technical grounding. It is not a question of formulating recommendations or making decisions on general matters alone, but of laying down mandates that will effectively ensure the viability of the relaunching of the integration process.

That is why –and you have before you a draft agenda consisting of three major chapters, which is actually only a draft that is being submitted for the approval of all of the Ministers— that agenda covers all of the issues that the Presidents commissioned us to examine at this meeting and that have to do with five or six areas of work that Guillermo only a few minutes ago developed very clearly and with a knowledge of what I can accomplish. These are the topics concerning the formation of the Free Trade Area, on which much has been done and where, apparently, all that is lacking to close the issue is its approval at the political level; the trade conflicts stemming not only from the failure to comply with Andean rules and regulations, but also from the application of others that, while permitted by our individual domestic laws, create tensions and conflicts that we must lay to rest.

The idea is to try to resolve the specific problems that are creating difficulties in our relationship so that we can prepare ourselves to consider other Andean integration options that are open to us and on which we have already received a first opinion from the region’s businessmen. These are related to, above all, the establishment of the Common External Tariff, a longstanding objective of regional integration, the formation of a Customs Union, which is just as important or even more so today, considering the need for our participation in hemispheric and regional integration mechanisms and for our action and projection on the external front.

An instrument of this kind would be of basic importance for the CAN’s international relations, and is much more important than previously because of the international crisis and the sweeping changes that have been taking place in the regional and global economic and political systems since September 11 and in the region’s political and economic systems since Argentina’s crisis erupted in December.

The need for the CAN’s external projection is obvious. We Foreign Ministers are accustomed to working together and need the economic and trade instrument that will enable us to assert our concerted presence, spokesmanship and action in international forums.

The progress we make toward achieving a Common External Tariff will immediately bring to the fore on the agenda and for discussion the problems involved in harmonizing the region’s economic and monetary policies, for the two are indissolubly interlinked. The problem –and this will depend upon the intelligence with which we handle these discussions— lies in being able to put together a package for negotiation that reflects the interests of all of the countries. This is the work that lies ahead of us. My country, as Pro Tempore Secretariat, had done its utmost to organize this meeting.

We have a group of ministers who are seated at the table with me and who traveled to all of the countries to collect, as transparently and clearly as possible, the positions of the different countries and to bring it to us as a basis for our discussion. We have not prepared working documents of any kind, nor have we drawn up or worked on any Presidential Declaration because we want to do that here, because this is a working meeting and we want the conclusions to be the result of our collective efforts and deliberations.

I beg you to excuse any shortcomings or errors in the logistics or conceptual organization of this meeting. I would like you to know that we have assumed this possible responsibility and that we receive it with our deepest and most authentic affection. Thank you very much and now let’s get down to work.

Thank you very much.