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OAS SECRETARY GENERAL TELLS U.S. BUSINESS GROUP LATIN AMERICA IS
MUCH MORE THAN IMAGE OF INSTABILITY AND IDEOLOGICAL CONFRONTATION

Advocating more United States attention to the hemisphere’s nations, Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General José Miguel Insulza today reaffirmed the need for stronger relations between Latin American and Caribbean countries and their economic partners. Insulza urged economic partners to “regard Latin America and the Caribbean with the same confidence as they do other regions of the world.”

In his address entitled “Why the U.S. Should Care about Latin America,” the Secretary General told some 250 business leaders brought together by the Rotary Club of San Diego, California, that “striking, but almost unnoticed” developments in economic growth, poverty and democracy in Latin America, contradict the image of the region as characterized only by political instability and ideological confrontation.

Now seeing its fifth consecutive year of major expansion, Latin America is enjoying significant and sustained growth—more than 4.5%—“and the region is on its way to a sixth, in 2008,” Insulza noted. He cited United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) statistics confirming that from 2002 to 2006, those living in poverty declined by 18 million, while those in critical poverty declined by 19 million—a relatively insufficient but encouraging figure. “The significance of these numbers is that they provide some idea of the depth of the crisis Latin America experienced in earlier decades,” the OAS Secretary General asserted.

“Latin America and the Caribbean are now more democratic than a quarter of a century ago, and their democracy is of higher quality,” he added, saying that in marked contrast to a few decades ago, “democracy is deciding in Latin America and the Caribbean, in participatory, competitive, and fair elections, as never before in our history.” He noted the significant increase in civil society involvement, and argued that democracy is well entrenched, with a “definitive definition” set forth in the OAS Inter-American Democratic Charter that the Member States adopted in 2001.

However, the OAS Secretary General lamented the region’s growing inequality, which he saw as “even starker than poverty.” He cited United Nations Development Program (UNDP) figures, and offered that while per capita income in Latin America and the Caribbean is only a few hundreds of dollars below the world average, it is much higher than that of the rest of the developing world. Poverty and inequality are also related to racial and gender-based discrimination, Insulza stressed, explaining how “a disproportionate number of indigenous and Afro-American households, or those headed by women, live in conditions of poverty.”

Reference: E-274/07