The contemporary political universe latin america: from the Cold War to perestroika

Abstract

With Rafael Angel Calderón, Hernán Castro, Bernd H. Niehaus, Rolando Laclé, and so many other friends who have cordially invited me to participate in this dialogue in the Pro-Defense Association of Freedom and Democracy, we have coincided in several Forums in the most diverse latitudes of the world. In Fidji, the distant island of the distant Archipelago of the South Pacific, with the assistance of leaders of the great powers of the area: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, to name a few and others of no more than thirty or fifteen thousand inhabitants, such as Vaniatu, Samoa. In Berlin, that city of encounter and distance between the capitalist West and the East Marxist. In America, in stellar moments of that admirable nation's democracy. As in my homeland, where a few months ago they participated, surrounded by the appreciation and respect of my fellow citizens, in an interesting and original symposium on the latin American repercussions of Soviet perestroika.

In these meetings, we have confirmed that ideas have no nationality, and that our peoples have to stand in tune with a humanity that has left, in the chests where things of the past are kept, dogmatism and with pragmatic realism is facing the analysis of problems and alternative proposals to fulfill the transit of the millennium that is already just around the corner.

Therefore, those of us who have some responsibility for leadership in our respective countries must enter without timoids to establish the exchange of political concepts, because, as experience teaches, and Europe is an example, the integration of peoples, without the personal contact at different levels of the states, does not go from being a geographical abstraction without life-giving sap.