Allow me to express our gratitude to the Secretary-
General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, who has done a laudable
job, thus enhancing the prestige of the United Nations.
I am here on behalf of the people of Honduras,
who have entrusted to me the torch of Central
American peace so that I can hold high in the
Assembly Hall this light that illuminates understanding
among peoples and nations.
Honduras is filled with a spirit of hope. Today we
have the best social and economic indicators of recent
decades. We have an average economic growth of more
than 7 per cent. We have very good results in the area
of job creation. We have begun to speed up poverty
reduction by more than 6 per cent in 18 months. We
have reduced forest fires by 40 per cent, together with
illegal logging and the advance of migratory
agriculture and extensive ranching. We now have a
climate conducive to public and private enterprise. We
are beginning to strictly implement the transparency
law as a civic instrument to provide better access to
public information.
We have already presented, during the recently
concluded sixty-first session of this very special forum,
the Assembly of the people, our demands, our
proposals and a reaffirmation of our values. Most of
the people of Honduras believe in democracy and
social liberalism, and in a free-market economy in its
true meaning, as a useful instrument for the equitable
trade of commodities the fruits of human labour.
However, in actual practice the only possible
means of testing our theories international trade
operates in an unequal and inequitable way, as do the
relations between powerful and economically weak
countries. Free trade, so highly touted in all our
speeches and international propaganda may, if we do
not redirect it properly, turn into yet another ruse
disguising unequal relations, the unjust distribution of
advantages and the undue, invisible code of unfair and
discriminatory competition.
Let us just look at the figures of the World Trade
Organization, which acknowledge that barely 7 per
cent of international trade goes through free channels
and the free market of economic and transparent rules.
The rest, that is, more than 90 per cent of global trade,
takes place outside the scope of the illusory standards
of liberty and justice that we all aspire to.
We must remedy this situation. Now is the time.
We must continue to establish the conditions to
improve international agreements. I acknowledge that
we are competing in imperfect markets with unequal
rules of the game, which provide advantages and
disadvantages. Some receive all kinds of subsidies and
preferential tariffs, which transform their products into
privileged goods. Speculative pricing, dumping,
monopolies, oligopolies and other discriminatory
practices are promoted, and certain parties are able to
advance their interests and impose their will on those
of us who are struggling just to reach the threshold of
development.
We demand that the rules of true free trade and
competition be respected. We do not want to be
relegated to the basement of history. Our peoples have
the right to reach the summits of prosperity.
One of the most obvious and classic examples of
this problem, which is worth mentioning in this
Assembly, is the excessive charges and increased
tariffs imposed by the European market on the bananas
from our region. A similar example is the recent
revision request from the United States that we impose
new tariffs on products and on the sale of textiles and
finished fabrics that Honduras exports to the United
States market. This weakens the spirit of the trade rules
we signed barely a year ago and would affect
Honduras’ sales to the United States market a
market that investors in our country have gained by
dint of hard work, competing in order to sell at the best
price and to sell goods of better quality.
As the Assembly can see, we are not coming here
to ask for the impossible or to demand what is not
owed to us. We simply want to go on record in
expressing our just and necessary demand for equitable
treatment in trade relations in the international market.
We are not asking for sympathy or pious
condescension. We are asking for respect. We want
people to pay a proper price for our products and to
value our effort and work with the same criterion that
is used to rate the effort of other peoples and other
communities that produce goods and services. We
demand equitable rules and standards. We require the
just treatment that we deserve as authentic and real
members of this planet that we all share.
Likewise, we would like to mention in the
Assembly a problem that almost all of us are
experiencing. We are suffering the same fate because
of speculative increases in the international markets in
the price of oil and its derivatives. Barely five years
ago, the price of a barrel of oil was about $13; today it
is already above $80 a barrel. It has increased by a
dramatic 600 per cent, thus subjecting our nations to a
state of greater dependence and international
destitution.
The economies of our countries cannot withstand
this economic blood-letting, which destroys any
attempt for social protection. A large part of what we
can invest in order to combat illness, ignorance, hunger
and age-old backwardness now drains to the large
transnational oil corporations. While we are fighting to
reduce poverty and its ills ills caused by those who
claim to be free of all blame and responsibility the
masters of the world and of trade are increasing prices
to indecent scales as instruments of pressure with the
rise of oil.
We are appealing to the global conscience to
share urgent efforts to intervene in the extreme
speculation in oil prices. We need to establish mutual
cooperation in order to produce forms of alternative
energy without it becoming a new opportunity to come
up with low- or high-intensity wars that only threaten
the sovereign rights and the right to strengthen peace
of the democracies of the world.
These are the contrasts of the modern world.
Paradoxically, while borders are opening up to
speculation, abuse and free trade in commodities, they
are closing to people, especially to emigrants. The lack
of ethical limits of a society of unfettered consumption
produces false expectations among young people in
developing countries. Bombarded by alienating
propaganda, illusions are created that later turn into
urgent economic needs, producing diasporas compelled
by the famous pursuit of the American dream.
There is no better opportunity than this universal
forum to expand on a theme that concerns all of us
countries of origin as well as receiving countries. It is
impossible to measure the drama of the emigrant
experience, the modern self-exiles that go from place
to place in search of better opportunities.
Honduras, my country, is a multi-ethnic and
multiracial society and full of immigrants. My country
throughout its history has been a territory of passage
and a refuge for foreign migrants and a centre which
has produced its own emigrants looking for a better life
in far-off places. This triple status as a country of
origin, a receiving country and a country of transit is
what gives us the moral authority to talk about this
topic with the necessary correctness and firmness, but
also with indispensable feeling and solidarity.
To be an emigrant is not to commit a crime.
Migration has not been and should never be considered
a crime or threat, but rather a human right. Migration
does not belong to nor should it be included in the
security agenda of any country. That was done only in
the time of fascism. It should be included and
considered within the framework where it really
belongs, that is, the development agenda of our
countries. In this way, we would no longer witness the
monstrous spectacle of inhuman persecution simply
because people are migrants, undocumented aliens,
pursued and humiliated. Emigration is a right, a simple
and basic human right.
Those who see the problem of migration simply
from the point of view of family remittances or voting
by emigrants abroad are committing a serious and
short-sighted error. They are wrong to look at the
phenomenon of growing migratory flows in the world
in this way. The problem is complex and difficult. It is
related to the economic structure of the country that
produces emigrants political problems, natural
disasters, war, violence, poverty, unemployment.
Migration weakens the social cohesion of the country
that produces emigrants, facilitates outflows of share
capital and stimulates the fleeing of manpower at its
most productive and hard-working stage. It empties
communities, impedes the processes of democracy and
generates unfavourable conditions because of which
this wonderful working force is compelled to leave.
Migration is a very complex and contradictory
social phenomenon that deserves serious scientific
treatment, beyond simple emotions and feelings.
Immigrants are people who are simply looking for
better market opportunities in order to sell the only
thing they have: their power to work, their energy, and
their boundless desire to overcome their poverty and
set out on the road to prosperity and well-being, which
are basic elements of life. They are human beings who
deserve to be treated as such and to enjoy the basic
respect that humans should enjoy. They want us to
recognize their rights and to give them responsibilities,
to value and consider them in what they represent, and
to see them for what they are: a productive and mobile
human force that is vital and beneficial both to the
economy that they serve and to the economy of their
country of origin.
I propose that we provide a legal basis, a fair and
legal international framework to ensure that
immigration becomes an ordered phenomenon
beneficial to all. I propose that we seek consensus,
reach agreement and establish the necessary
international cooperation. Our world needs immigrants
and I implore its representatives, in the name of mercy
and justice, to help stop the shameful persecution of
immigrants. We must apply the law of family
reunification. It is God's will that the families of
immigrants be reunified.
All of us in Central America, Mexico and Latin
America deeply regret the fact that we have seen no
progress on the corresponding legislative initiative that
the President of the United States submitted to the
United States Congress. We know that he did so with
the best of wills, and we therefore believe that
President Bush should not falter in promoting that
proposal. The construction of a wall can only separate
us. We must find other mechanisms to resolve the
problem. Halting the mass deportations and reunifying
families would be a gesture highly appreciated in
national and international public opinion. We also
recognize the work of various Governments, in
particular the efforts of President Rodríguez Zapatero
of Spain, who has reached immigration agreements and
quotas with various countries.
Just as the Kyoto Protocol protects biological life
on the planet, the Charter of the United Nations and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantee life
and peace in our societies. Let us ensure that they are
implemented.
We express solidarity with peoples who are
fighting for their identity, and reaffirm our support for
the Republic of Taiwan in its efforts to achieve
recognition in this forum of nations, in its fight for
independence, and in its constructive and faithful
dedication to the many development processes under
way in Central American countries.
Central America and Honduras, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Belize and
the Dominican Republic are united by the dreams of
Francisco Morazán, the champion of Central America,
a region of leaders in contemporary continental thought
and artists of stature throughout Latin America and the
world, the belt of the Americas and a bridge to the
world, in the words of General Omar Torrijos. Through
me, they offer a fraternal and united invitation to visit.
We have every facility. We have the most beautiful
places on the planet, with great potential in such areas
as tourism, bio-energy, telecommunications,
agriculture and the environment.
We cannot remain passive or inactive in the face
of social despair. Our lives are replete with dreams. We
must, where necessary, overcome the neglect to which
the developing world is subject. Our great poet and
thinker, Alfonso Guillén Zelaya, said that we certainly
cannot control fate. Prometheus always has to find
someone to liberate him if civilization is to move
forward. It is not possible for humankind to come to an
end of its history without first giving the most
disadvantaged peoples of the world the opportunity to
live.
We trust in the future. Humankind knows that
hope is not lost and has full confidence in the
principles of the infinite god of love who guides us,
and not in the god of violence, whom we reject. Before
this Assembly, we express the fervent wish for peace in
the world, a new dawn for humankind in which
everything would be different and our energies would
focus on serving human beings and not on trade.