At the outset, I would like to salute Mr. Ali Treki, our
President and a distinguished diplomat. I wish him
much success in leading the deliberations of this
session. At the same time, I would like to express our
admiration and respect for Father Miguel d’Escoto
Brockmann, who led the Assembly at its last session.
My presence highlights our commitment to
multilateralism in general and to the United Nations in
particular. I salute Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and
reiterate to him our appreciation for his management.
Allow me to say how the Guatemalan people
appreciate and value the presence of the United
Nations. We try to reciprocate, in part with our
participation in various peacekeeping operations.
I would like to touch briefly on some topics that
are at the heart of our concerns but that at the same
time have an important international dimension.
First, like the other countries of our region,
Guatemala has been strongly impacted by the
international economic and financial crisis. This fact is
reflected in the value and volume of our exports, in the
level of family remittances and especially in the level
of economic activity, employment and tax collection.
09-52425 36
In more general terms, the crisis has made it more
difficult for us to meet the Millennium Development
Goals.
To make matters worse, our efforts to mitigate the
impact of the crisis have been partially annulled by an
irregular climatic event, as we are suffering the worst
drought in the last thirty years. This phenomenon has
affected the harvest of basic grains and has had a
serious impact on the poorest regions of our country.
Because of this, I decided to declare a state of
emergency. The disaster is not just because of the
drought, but also an historic disaster, striking the
poorest people in our country, whom our Government
is aiming to lift from extreme poverty.
This situation illustrates one of the manifold
manifestations of climate change occurring in diverse
regions, and it comes on top of the burden of the
regressive effects we experienced during the first half
of 2008, in the double crises of energy and food,
followed by the aforementioned effects of the
economic crisis. Unfortunately, the adverse effects of
this situation disproportionately affect those sectors of
the population with less capacity and less income. The
picture is complicated by the fact that the imperative of
the State to address the people’s needs is severely
restricted by fiscal considerations.
Nevertheless, we are not sitting on our hands, far
from it. We have surged forward with a dynamic and
strong social cohesion programme. Today, more than
half a million families are covered by programmes in
the poorest and most excluded regions of the country.
Today, I note with real satisfaction that in only
18 months since our Administration began, our health
indicators — all of the health indicators — have
improved to an extraordinary extent.
Education indicators have improved. For
example, this year enrolment increased by 37 per cent
in secondary education, by 9 per cent in primary
education and by 27 per cent in preschool. Now we
have the problem of schools that cannot cope with the
number of children, but we prefer that problem to not
having children in school. This means that there is an
urgent need to build more than 14,400 classrooms over
the next 14 months, but we prefer that to having
children on the streets or working.
The international cooperation that we have
received in this effort is important, and we would like
to recognize here the support of the Inter-American
Development Bank, the World Bank and the Central
American Bank for Economic Integration, which have
helped us with our efforts to build social cohesion and
to support the indigenous people who constitute our
population.
I wish to sincerely express our total conviction
with regard to the change that we all must make. It is a
change of attitude, a change of will, as President Lula
said yesterday. It is important that we see the birth of
this new international order, this new order of justice
and equity.
The drought in Guatemala exacerbated abject
poverty, but a solution to drought will not resolve the
poverty situation in the country, because it is structural
and historical, resulting from 50 years of neglect of
rural populations and our indigenous peoples.
We will follow with interest the deliberations of
the Group of 20, which is meeting this very day in
Pittsburgh. We trust that that exclusive forum will also
take into account the concerns of countries with small
and medium-sized economies. In addition, we support
the efforts being promoted within the multilateral
international financial institutions and the United
Nations to improve their capacity to help developing
countries and to address the crisis. That is why our
country is seriously promoting the capitalization of the
Inter-American Development Bank and our regional
financial organization, the Central American Bank for
Economic Integration.
I should like to mention the lack of security in
our country. Our country is being assaulted by
organized crime, and our Government, within the space
of a year and a half, has begun a merciless war against
it. In this forum, I wish to express my appreciation for
the magnificent cooperation and support that we have
received, particularly from Colombia, Panama and
Mexico, to attack and staunch the scourge of drug
trafficking and to begin a process of eliminating it.
I also wish to inform the Assembly with great
satisfaction that, in terms of seizures of cocaine alone,
we have seen a 700 per cent increase compared with
the same period under the previous Government;
seizures of marijuana have risen fifteenfold, and poppy
eradication has increased by 300 per cent during the
same period. Our efforts against drug trafficking are
definitive and resolute, but we recognize that it is a
phenomenon that must be attacked at the regional
level. That is why we are working closely with the
37 09-52425
fraternal country of Mexico and our Central American
brothers to address it directly and regionally.
The problem of drug trafficking has had a serious
impact on Guatemala. For more than eight years, the
country was handed over to organized crime —
specifically, drug trafficking — leaving territories and
trafficking corridors more unprotected than ever
before. The national army was reduced beyond the
level mandated by peace agreements, and territorial
control was suspended. The National Civilian Police
were seriously compromised by drug traffickers,
becoming corrupt and dishonest.
However, thanks to the United Nations and the
presence of the International Commission against
Impunity in Guatemala — a United Nations exercise in
Guatemala, unique in the world — we have support
and advice for our Public Ministry, and our prosecutors
and are making significant progress. For the first time
in Guatemala’s history, one of the drug-trafficking
bosses is a fugitive, and we will capture him very soon.
The notorious drug-trafficking families have never
been sent such a strong message.
We have also imprisoned 10 murder suspects
connected to the 10 May crisis. I take this opportunity
to thank this forum, the United Nations, for the
unrestricted support provided to my Government
during the crisis. I am confident that the efforts of the
International Commission against Impunity in
Guatemala will reach the masterminds of that
despicable crime and that the truth will be found and
justice done. What could have become a technical coup
d’état has become a genuine example of justice and
truth. I am sure that my Government, which has
ensured the total independence of this investigation,
will get to the heart of the matter and that the truth will
soon be found.
We have worked hard on the security of our
citizens, and I recognize that it is a long and
complicated process. Here again, the assistance of the
International Commission is essential, and we believe
that this experience will be effectively used by our
Public Ministry, which has already begun the process
of re-engineering and restructuring itself.
I should like to mention the case of Honduras,
our fraternal neighbouring country. From the very
beginning, Guatemala has supported a return to
democracy and the rule of law in Honduras. Nowhere
in the world, much less in Central America — where
democracy has cost us so many lives and where so
many deaths and, in the case of Guatemala, massacres,
have affected us — can we allow a President to be
deposed at gunpoint and fail to use democratic and
legal mechanisms. We will accept nothing less than the
return of President Zelaya to power so that the
elections in Honduras can be carried out legitimately
and our Honduran brothers can soon live in peace and
tranquillity. Our Government has been unsparing in its
support for President Zelaya, and I am sure that we will
see Central America return to its natural rhythm of
integration, democratic development and democratic
security.
I should also like to highlight our adherence to
nearly all human rights mechanisms, principles and
norms within and outside Guatemala. We are a
multi-ethnic, pluri-cultural and multilingual nation. We
have a beautiful 108,000-square-kilometre country
with 23 cultures and 23 peoples sharing the blessed
land that God gave us. That is why we are committed
to promoting the strengthening of the participation of
all the indigenous peoples of Guatemala in terms of our
daily life, development, peace and security.
We have adopted a law on free access to
information, with very few problems, which has
guaranteed free access to all State information except
that related to security matters and foreign relations.
That is why we wish to stress the need to strengthen
the mechanisms for human rights and arms control. I
believe that countries have the freedom to arm
themselves for defence, but I do not agree that our
countries should be arms-trafficking corridors. I also
believe that countries exporting armaments should be
more careful and have more controls and standards
with regard to the entire weapons trade. Our country,
my Government, has increased its seizures of illegal
weapons almost tenfold, but we still have much work
ahead of us. Meanwhile, many innocent people are
dying as a result of drug trafficking, smuggling and
organized crime.
Let us make progress in the definition of the
concept of the responsibility to protect our respective
populations from genocide and war crimes, which we
have already endured; ethnic cleansing and crimes
against humanity, from which Guatemala suffered
greatly for 36 years.
I wish to express my total conviction that the
United Nations must be constantly renewed and
09-52425 38
adapted to today’s needs. Our civilization is changing.
This is a crisis not just of energy or finance or climate;
it is a crisis of values, of principles. The financial crisis
is a crisis of values and principles, and we are paying
for it with the poverty of our people. That is why we
need better adaptation of the United Nations
mechanisms so we can really get to the bottom — al
grano, as we say in Guatemala — of the problems of
poverty and inequality, to strengthen democracy and
the rule of law.
I have the honour to be familiar with the Mayan
cosmic vision, and I am quite sure that in 2012, the
transformation of civilization it prophesied will begin.
This is a very ancient prophecy and it will be fulfilled,
just as all the others have been. We will enter an era of
great humanity and great human strength. And America
is also changing. If you look at the Americas today,
they have nothing to do with the way they were
10 years ago. Democracy, although it has problems,
has improved and been strengthened, thank heaven.
We support United Nations and Organization of
American States (OAS) resolutions with regard to
Honduras, and I am also happy to affirm that we have
made very concrete progress in honourably ending our
historical dispute with our brother nation of Belize. In
December, under the good offices of the OAS, both
Governments signed a special agreement, which, prior
to complying with the domestic ratification processes
of our Congresses, commits us to seek a juridical
settlement through the International Court of Justice.
We hope that, through these internal procedures, we
will be able to proceed to plebiscites in both countries,
in order to put an end to the dispute with our brother
country of Belize.
I would like to conclude with some very brief
reflections on our Organization and its agenda for the
future. I would like it to continue to give priority to the
poor, those with limited incomes, children, young
people living in the mountains of our countries who do
not have access to health care, education or drinking
water. The drought and the malnutrition we are seeing
among our children in Guatemala are nothing more
than the product of historical injustice. If all of us in
the United Nations share in this fight to help those who
have so little, I am sure that we will have more for
everyone. The more we support those who have less,
the more we will all have in the end. I hope that this
Assembly session reaches a fruitful conclusion.