The Rio Group and the Millennium Summit.

By His Excellency Andres Pastrana Arango

President of the Republic of Colombia

The Millennium Summit coincided with the period during which Colombia has had the great honour to serve as the pro tempore Secretariat of the Rio Group.

For the first time, our region-Latin America and the Caribbean-is celebrating the advent of a new millennium. We have been privileged to participate in this celebration, together with the rest of the world and, more particularly, in the context of the General Assembly of the most representative and universal organization-the United Nations.

As spokesman of the 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries that are members of the Rio Group, I have referred to a number of issues that are important to the region and are part of the international agenda for the twenty-first century. I should like to share here some of these contributions that have become an integral part of the Declaration of the Millennium Summit and which will be the subject of much deliberation and discussion during the Millennium Assembly.

Since the early 1980s, when a group of Latin American States created the Contadora Group and the Support Group, the region has sought to reach common positions on the main issues on the UN agenda. These Groups made a useful contribution to our joint efforts to ensure that, within an essentially regional framework, we could lay the foundations that would subsequently enable Central American countries to restore peace and security to their region. This was also an aspiration to which the United Nations owes its creation and which inspired its active participation in this process.

Since the establishment of the Rio Group in 1986 with the adoption of the Declaration of Rio de Janeiro, the region has developed an even closer relationship with the world Organization. Today, the United Nations and the Rio Group have become the two multilateral forums of the greatest political importance for Latin America and the Caribbean. The former, because it is the most universal and legitimate multilateral organ for the management of the global agenda, and the latter, because it is the broadest forum for dialogue and political concertation at the regional level.

As we look back on 14 years of existence of the Rio Group, it is clear that the United Nations has been the principal venue for dialogue and political concertation between members of the Group.

What is more, not only has the United Nations provided an appropriate political forum for our Group to express itself as the principal spokesman for Latin America and the Caribbean on a series of issues important to the region, it has also permitted members to engage in dialogue during the regular sessions of the General Assembly with friendly countries from other regions and with those with which we share common values, such as the defence and strengthening of democracy and the protection of human rights. These are advantages that helped us to make our contributions to the Millennium Summit.

In response to Secretary-General Kofi Annan's invitation that was issued to mark the advent of the new millennium, the Rio Group decided to embark on a comprehensive review of the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century. The concrete result of this review was the Declaration of Cartagena, which was adopted at the XIV Summit of Heads of State and Government, held last June in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. In this Declaration, which offers a regional perspective on issues on the global agenda, the leaders entrusted me with the mandate to present their conclusions as a substantive contribution to the Millennium Summit and the Millennium Assembly. This mandate has permitted the Rio Group to reaffirm its positions and views on the various items on the global agenda and to reinforce its role as the region's principal interlocutor at the United Nations. I wish to share with you some of the issues which we brought before the Summit and the Assembly.

Our review at the highest level was based on a commitment to democracy. We reaffirmed our belief in and commitment to strengthening representative democracy as a system of government for the region. We believe in respect for human rights as a basic postulate that goes hand in hand with the promotion of effective, ethical and responsible participation of citizens in democratic life.

On the subject of globalization, we began with an initial observation, namely, that the end of the twentieth century has left, as its legacy, a world that is increasingly interdependent and globalized, and one marked by the contradictions of progress with inequity and development with exclusion. In Cartagena, we acknowledged some of the benefits of globalization. We noted, for example, that it had increased trade and financial flows and deepened economic integration.

It has also created opportunities for wider dissemination of Knowledge, technology and other benefits, which must remain accessible to all and become opportunities for achieving increased growth and development in our countries.

But we also highlighted some of the negative aspects of globalization: the transnational nature of crime; the money laundering activities of organized crime; the trade in environmental resources; and the trafficking in arms. In order to meet these challenges, we are convinced that the international community has a responsibility to play a more practical and effective role, based on the principle of shared responsibility in international relations.

Another important agreement reached in the Declaration of Cartagena concerns the reaffirmation of our commitment to multilateralism as the ideal organizing principle in international relations and to the need to respect the principles of the United Nations Charter. The idea is to once more think of multilateralism as the vehicle that would most effectively regulate the new international reality by seeking a more humane and just globalization that would operate within a framework of expanding democratization. We are pleased that the Millennium Summit has recognized the importance of the principle of a shared responsibility by all nations for the management of the global agenda, the strengthening of regional forums and the development of frameworks for cooperation between these forums and global multilateral organizations, within their respective areas of competence.

On disarmament, I can say that Latin America and the Caribbean is proud to have been the first densely populated region of the world to be free of nuclear weapons. We aspire to be a region free of illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons, and free of such particularly cruel and deadly weapons as anti-personnel mines. We stand prepared to participate actively in these aspects of disarmament.

With regard to the development of our peoples, we expressed our conviction that growth in international trade is an instrument for increasing the prosperity of our countries. To this end, we have proposed the early launching by the World Trade Organization of a new round of global and comprehensive trade negotiations aimed at reviewing existing tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. The external debt problem also gives cause for particular concern within our region. We placed special emphasis on the needs of the most indebted countries of our region and stressed the importance that we attached to the high-level event on financing for development.

The Millennium Summit provided an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century. And Latin America and the Caribbean, represented in the Rio Group, will over the course of the next few months closely monitor developments in those areas that we identified in the Millennium Declaration. That is our commitment.