Speech by the President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, at the Opening Ceremony of the Special Meeting of the Andean Presidential Council
Santa Cruz, January 30, 2002

This morning I bring you the embrace of an Andean people who recovered their democracy only a few short months ago after a long and arduous journey. I bring you the greetings of a people who have always wagered on Andean integration for historical reasons and also because of the many points of agreement among our objectives.

Our feeling of integration was born 180 years ago, when the Libertador, Simón Bolívar, started his historic exploits and embarked on his dream of building a united continent, an aspiration we continue to harbor despite all of the problems we have had to confront. We have been journeying together for centuries. The course we have followed, we have built by respecting each other, by seeking points of agreement, by strengthening our diversity, while at the same time sharing the values of democracy, solidarity, respect for human rights and a market economy with a human face. Today, my friends, we have a commitment to continue expediting our integration process with the conviction that the Andean Community is the natural vehicle for our projection.

This compels us to vigorously boost new forms of integration, not only for the purpose of competing more and better in world markets, but also for becoming integrated economically and in other dimensions beyond the strictly commercial, tariff or financial.

Over the years, we have seen trade within the Community grow heavily. We are moving steadily toward the achievement of a common project: the Andean Common Market. We are now challenged to give it new life. Even so, recent events that have taken place in the world and experiences closer to home, in Latin America, are leading us directly toward a more versatile, more multipurpose integration.

My friends: Just as there can be no political democracy without economic democracy, there can be no successful integration in the political and economic spheres without deliberate integration on social matters.

Friends and colleagues: I have brought two proposals to share with you that we have been working on since the beginning of our government a few months ago. And I would like to share them with you so that we can work on them today:

The first is to promote a meeting in April, a meeting of Foreign and Defense Ministers of the Andean Community of Nations, to set up a mechanism that will enable us to progressively reduce our military spending and to rechannel those funds toward social investment, particularly in nutrition, health and education, so that, together, we can win the war against poverty in the Andean Community.

The second proposal is to hold a meeting of all of the bodies of the Andean integration System, from the General Secretariat to the social conventions, the health convention, the Andrés Bello Convention on Education, the Simón Rodríguez Convention on Labor, the Labor and Business Advisory Councils, and the Latin American Reserve Fund, with the valuable cooperation of the Andean Court of Justice, among others, in May before the European and the Iberian-American Summits –and I offer the heart of Peru for that meeting— for two purposes, actually, I would say three. First, to convey the joint position of the Andean Community to the Summits of the European Union and of Latin America. Second, to launch the reengineering of the idea of integration in the Andean Community. And third, I invite you at that meeting to start –we can continue afterwards in Guayaquil, Gustavo, perhaps in July— to put together an Andean integration agenda, an agenda for Andean social integration.

Our Foreign and other Ministers have worked hard to examine the integration mechanisms in the area of trade and tariffs. That is only one course in our integration –an important one, I grant you--, but the time has come not only to submit the Andean Community to a reengineering process, but also to build a common social agenda in the Andean countries. We need to focus on extreme poverty, for example, particularly in the border areas. We need to study how to finance our war on poverty, how to root out illiteracy, how to bring down the rates of early malnutrition and infant mortality. We need to arm our Andean brothers and sisters with the weapons of knowledge so that they can win the war against poverty.

These are the two proposals that I put forward for your consideration, my friends. We can enrich them, but I believe that if we do it together, we can go a long way successfully in this Andean integration effort.

Thank you very much.