The government's economic policy United States for Latin America

Abstract

I am very grateful for the warm welcome and generous words I have heard. Mr. Rector of the University, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a great pleasure for me to be back in Costa Rica and exchange some ideas with you and with this distinguished panel. I will try to develop two or three general points on the central issue to focus the discussion a little and allow us to start a dialogue on this.

The immediate origins of the Bush Initiative thus date back to the Summit between President Bush and his Andean colleagues in Cartagena de Indias just over a year ago. At that summit meeting, President Bush initially in thought of essentially focusing the problems of drug trafficking very directly. After having a long dialogue with his colleagues, he realized that it was essential here to address the issues of drug trafficking within a more general framework; especially that it was necessary to seek a more constructive economic gear between the United States and the neighboring countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and instructed its Treasury Secretary, Secretary Brady, to develop a program, and it is essentially this instruction that originates the Initiative. We must begin, I believe, to understand it well, by understanding some things that define what it is not, since it happens in a time of dizzying changes on the world stage: changes in the situation of the Soviet Union, its almost retirement until those last days altering its presence in a remarkable way on the international stage, the changes in Eastern Europe and immediately after the Crisis of the Middle East. All this with the background of that almost magical year of '92, we are talking about Europe 92, there are those who talk about America 92, anyway, a series of slogans and concerns of convergent changes that make us think that the international order as we have known it is changing and has to be redefined. So immediately President Bush launches an Initiative for the Americas and everyone says, "aha," here the United States is looking to create a new "hemispheric bloc," and I think that's just the first point to be set very clearly. The Initiative is not, or seeks to be, a block or the creation of a bloc. In a way it is even, from our point of view, the denial of blocks; perhaps the way I find it best to explain that is that if one wants to think in terms of blocks it is an effort to use the joint weight of the Americas to prevent the creation of blocs, to fight against the protectionism that is potentially seen in the European Economic Community, especially in agriculture and in The Asian countries led by Japan. The United States is not abandoning its global vision with this initiative, what is being sorry is to develop, giving priority to neighbouring countries, a series of openings to trade and more agile economic relations.