Lima, August 28, 2006

It is indeed an honor for the General Secretariat of the Andean Community to welcome Your Excellency, Foreign Minister María Consuelo Araujo, at our headquarters and to wish you the greatest success in the noble duties entrusted to you by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, to direct your country’s foreign policy. We are familiar with your brilliant professional career, your academic excellence and your successful performance as Colombia’s Minister of Culture, a position in which you were voted the “Best Minister” by the country’s media for two straight years and, at the international level, were awarded the title of “Young Leader for 2005” by the World Economic Forum.

And the fact ¡s that, in effect, you combine masterfully, youth, experience, a successful career, strong professional qualifications and personal talent. For all of these reasons, for the excellent team of professionals that accompany you and because this General Secretariat will, as it always has done, do its very best professionally, I am certain that the ties between the Colombian Foreign Ministry under your direction and the General Secretariat I am honored to preside temporarily as charged by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of Trade, will continue to be strengthened, for the good of our nations, which are the recipients of all of the efforts of this Andean integration process.

Dear friends and colleagues:

During these 37 years of integration efforts, the Andean Community has reached important targets that were set out in the Cartagena Agreement, such as the elimination of all tariff and non tariff barriers in a free trade area endowed with clearly defined rules of trade; the liberalization of services; the expediting of the movement of people, who are today able to circulate using their national documents with no need for visas; facilitation in the locating of investments; and the development of a strong dispute settlement system that gives the Andean legal system security, in the degree to which it prevents and sanctions the failure to comply with commitments.

In recent years, the Andean agenda has been enriched and focused on three major areas of action:

The first concerns the Deepening of trade integration and encompasses the perfecting of customs, technical and sanitary, and other standards and regulations designed to bring about fair competition in the enlarged market, together with the development of more advanced regulations in certain service sectors, like international transportation and communications.

The second is aimed at the Promotion of competitiveness and sustainable development, with the design of mechanisms in spheres like small and medium enterprises, the development of border areas as territorially integrated spaces, energy cooperation and the furthering of an Andean environmental agenda.

The third is directed toward Political and social cooperation and covers areas as important as Common Foreign Policy, joint action in the fight against drugs and the promotion of alternative development, the so-called Social agenda that includes the well-known Integral Plan for Social Development (PIDS), the Common Andean Security Policy, and the promotion of democracy and human rights as an essential premise of our integration process.

This Andean agenda --which is always capable of being improved by the Member Countries-- presents major challenges to be met if we truly want to make our integration an effective instrument for our nations’ development. We are aware that although we have an open market without barriers, high transportation costs and local dynamics, particularly in border areas where much remains to be done to streamline processing and facilitate the free flow of goods and people, create stumbling blocs within our internal Community area. We must continue working to keep technical, sanitary and phytosanitary requirements from unduly disrupting trade and to convert them, rather, into standards of international competitiveness. We must join efforts to stem environmental depredation and protect the resources of our biodiversity.

The time when Community Decisions were approved without considering how the countries would implement and follow them up has happily passed. We now need a real and practical effort to link-up on a day-to-day basis our customs, transportation and communications, and police authorities, the judges who enforce Community law in each country, and the businessmen and workers who are operating in the Andean Community area.

In this context, our thinking must be long-term and we must address the major challenge of contributing increasingly to culture. In this field, we must not only pursue the subregional strategy of preserving and protecting our cultural heritage, but must also seek as rapidly as possible to reach two targets already agreed by our Presidents: i) to introduce integration contents into the basic educational study programs in the Member Countries; and ii) to prepare a development strategy for the cultural industries. This latter field offers great possibilities for furthering, from the vantage point of Community bodies, Andean movie making, publishing, and theater, the creation and broadcasting of music, radio and television programs, and show business, etc., as well as for helping to produce the Community legislation that will facilitate the free circulation of cultural products within the Andean region.

All of these challenges that have been briefly touched upon must be met without losing sight of the prospective South American Community of Nations, which should be constructed, as the Heads of State agreed in December 2004 in Cusco, on the basis of already existing mechanisms and contributions --in other words, through the convergence of the CAN, Mercosur, Chile, Guyana and Suriname.

The Andean Community has embarked on a new phase of geopolitical projection, not only toward the South American economic and political area we hope to create, but also toward the Pacific region, as an inseparable part of our future, and toward the building of stronger ties with the world’s most important integration process, the European Union, to which we are linked by strong historical bonds and a shared vision of socially-inclusive democratic and sustainable development that gives due consideration to asymmetries.

In this connection, I should like to underscore three important advances made in the Andean Community’s external projection:

Dear friends:

We, in the General Secretariat of the Andean Community, are particularly pleased with the goals the Republic of Colombia has set itself in the so-called “Visión Colombia II Centenario 2019,” presented by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez in August 2005, as a prospective exercise in thinking about what kind of country all Colombians would like to see when the Second Centennial of the country’s political independence is celebrated on August 7, 2019.

The Chapter about Foreign Policy emphasizes the importance of democracy as a political regime, the observance of human rights and the fight against drugs and terrorism, and proposed consolidating strategic alliances to achieve those aims. It also underscores the challenges created by poverty and underdevelopment, which the international community should seek to remedy by reaching the Millennium targets. And lastly, its presents the challenge of environmental sustainability that has been raised, involving the problems of climate change and the management of forest and water resources, among other aspects that are critical for the planet’s survival. These are precisely three of the issues that the Ministers of Foreign Affairs have been furthering and prioritizing in the agenda of the Andean Community, an area in which Colombia has exercised brilliant leadership.

Furthermore, this strategic Colombian Government document stresses the strategic role the CAN could play as a basic mechanism for Colombia’s economic and trade relations and its internal development, as well as for its relations with the European Union and for the strengthening of Colombia’s presence in Asia and on the Pacific Rim, and as support in the area of migration, among other important objectives.

I would like to assure you, esteemed Minister, that the Government of Colombia --and you in particular-- may always count on the professional and dedicated support of this General Secretariat to further and accomplish these important purposes, which coincide fully with our Andean integration agenda. We have highly competent officials in our ranks, with broad experience and specialization in those subjects, who have demonstrated their mystique and dedication to the tasks of the integration process.

I would like to conclude by taking advantage of this opportunity to express, on behalf of all of the officials of the General Secretariat and in my own name, our special appreciation and recognition to Dr. Carolina Barco, your distinguished predecessor, who performed brilliantly as Colombia’s Foreign Minister and her country’s representative on the Andean Council of Foreign Ministers from August 2002 to August 2006 and who chaired that body from August 2002 to August 2003. I would like to ask you to kindly transmit our special greetings to Dr. Barco and our best wishes for her success in the new and important post she has just assumed in Washington.

Thank-you very much.