Oscar Arias Speech
La Prensa (Managua, Nicaragua) 5/7/09
(Full translation of speech by Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica, at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad & Tobago on April 18, 2009)
“I have the impression that every time Caribbean and Latin American countries get together with the president of the United States of America it is to
ask for things or to demand something. Almost always it’s to blame the United States for our past, present and future ills. I don’t believe that is
at all just. We cannot forget that Latin America had universities before the United States created Harvard and William & Mary, which are the first
universities of that country. We cannot forget that in this continent, as in the whole world, at least until 1750 all Americans were more or less the
same: all were poor.
When the industrial revolution came about in England, other countries hopped on that wagon: Germany, France, the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand…… and thus the Industrial Revolution passed over Latin America like a comet, and we didn’t realize it. Certainly, we lost the opportunity.
There’s also a very big difference. Reading the history of Latin America, compared with the history of the United States, one realizes that Latin
America did not have a Spaniard John Winthrop, nor a Portuguese who might have come with a bible in hand, ready to build “a City on a Hill”, a city
that would shine, as was the wish of the pilgrims who arrived in the United States.
Fifty years ago, Mexico was richer than Portugal. In 1950, a country such as Brazil had a higher per capita income than that of South Korea. Sixty
years ago, Honduras had more riches per capita than Singapore, and today Singapore – in something like 35 or 40 years – is a country with $40,000
annual income per person. Well, we Latin Americans did something wrong.
What did we do wrong? I cannot list all the things we did wrong. To start, we have a seven-year schooling. That is the average length of schooling in
Latin America and it’s not the case with the majority of Asian countries. It’s certainly not the case in countries such as the United States and
Canada, with the best education in the world, similar to the Europeans’. For every 10 students who enter high school in Latin America, in some
countries only one finishes. There are countries with an infant mortality of 50 children per thousand, when in the more advanced countries it is 8, 9
or 10. We have countries where the tax load is 12 percent of the gross national product, and it’s no one’s responsibility, except our own, that we
don’t tax the richest people of our countries. No one is to blame for that, except we ourselves.
In 1950 each American citizen was four times richer than a Latin American citizen. Today, an American citizen is 10, 15 or 20 times richer than a
Latin American. That is not the fault of the United States, it’s our fault.
The value system of the 20th century, which seems to be the one we are putting into practice in the 21st century, is a wrong value system. Because it
cannot be that the rich world devotes 100 billion dollars to alleviate the poverty of 80 percent of the world’s population – in a planet that has 2.5
billion human beings with a $2 a day income – and that it spends 13 times more ($1,300,000,000,000) in weapons and soldiers.
It’s incredible that Latin America spends $50 billion in weapons and soldiers. I ask myself: who is our enemy? Our enemy, of that inequality which
President Correa (of Ecuador) points out very correctly, is the lack of education; it is illiteracy; it’s that we don’t spend on the health of our
people; that we don’t create the necessary infrastructure, the roads, the highways, the ports, the airports; it’s that we are not dedicating the
necessary resources to stop the deterioration of the environment; it’s the lack of equality which we have, which really makes us ashamed; it is a
product, among many things, of course, of the fact that we are not educating our sons and our daughters.
One goes to a Latin American university and it still seems we are in the sixties, seventies or eighties. It seems we forgot that something very
important happened on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and that the world changed. We have to accept that this is a different world, and
about this I honestly believe that all thinking persons, all the economists, all the historians, almost agree that the 21st century is the century of
the Asians, not of the Latin Americans. And I, unfortunately, agree with them. Because while we keep arguing about the “isms” (which is better?
capitalism, socialism, communism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, social-christianism…) the Asians found a very realistic “ism” for the 21st and for the
end of the 20th century, which is pragmatism. Just to mention an example, let us remember that when Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore and South Korea,
after having realized that his own neighbors were quickly becoming richer, he returned to Peking and told the old comrades who had accompanied him on
the Long March: “Well, the truth is, dear comrades, that I don’t care whether the cat is black or white, the only thing that matters to me is that it
catch mice”. And if Mao would have been alive he would have died again when he said that “the truth is that becoming rich is glorious”. And while
the Chinese do this, and from 79 until today they grow at some 11, 12 or 13 percent, and they have taken some 300 million out of poverty, we keep on
arguing about ideologies which we should have buried a long time ago.
The good news is that Deng Xiaoping achieved this when he was 74 years old. Looking around, I don’t see (among the presidents who participated in the
Summit) anyone who is close to 74 years of age. That’s why I ask you not to reach that age in order to make the changes which we have to make.”
- – - – - -
Richard on the Hill
*ABROAD*, adj. At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to
be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
-- Ambrose Bierce, _The Enlarged Devil\'s Dictionary_
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