The OAS in Panama:
34 foreign ministers, 60 issues, a thousand officers, 5 days
ith the promise that the OAS "shall depart from its
traditional crisis solving schemes, to go to long span strategic plans and proposals for
the entire region" the so-called hemispheric system will meet in General Assembly. It
was in Panama that Simón Bolívar tried to set the ground for a great amphictionyc
gathering. Certainly such singular project will be evoked in most of the 34 foreign
ministers' addresses and in the words of more than a thousand officers who will be
working on the agenda's seventy issues between Monday, June third until Friday the
seventh.
To say the truth, most issues will not be new, nor is it the first time that they
are being discussed at the OAS and its special agencies. We are looking more at a
ritual episode since they are never solved þat least in most casesþ, it is just fair to
keep discussing them; that is truly an indication of the fact that two things are
acknowledged: first, that they have not been solved, and then that they exist and no
one denies it.
Some of the issues in the agenda shall be deal with by the 34 ministers. The most
relevant ones will be among them will be present, such as, for instance, one that never
goes unnoticed: the evaluation of the agreements and resolutions of the 1994
Hemispheric Summit. It is an issue that calls for blasting addresses and, mostly, to talk
about the twenty first century and the year 2,000. Also, it is more so because it
contemplates nothing less but the creation of a great free trade zone for the year
2.005.
Most of the other issues (drug traffic, terrorism, social development and critical
poverty, the Panama Canal, or the use or abuse of drug money, in other words money
laundering) most probably will be left to the thousand officer who know about them
because they deal with them permanently, from dawn to late night in the quietness of
Washington D.C., where its mayor looks at them with incredulity when not with tongue
on cheek.
One may be led to believe that 60 so complex issues may be hardly debated
during just five days þmore less could decisions and agreements be made on them. One
must say, however, that those issues will be dealt with by experts who have already
reviewed them extensively and for whom there are no secrets in them. The problem
does not lie there. It does not lie in the problems' complexities but rather in their
proliferation, in the tangle, in the net, in the absolute immobilization brought to the
OAS by such a bundle of calamities, now that the organization is departing from its
traditional crisis solving schemes to enter into long span regional strategic plans and
proposals.
There is indeed much optimism in these words! A legitimate optimism, it
expresses good will. It would be great, however, if the OAS general meeting, with the
presence of the USA, of North, Central and South American and Caribbean countries
could stick to a single issue rather than to 60.þ What would be the implications and the
consequences of a deep discussion on the (growing) drug traffic and its social effects,
on money laundering and the worldwide network of interests behind it? After all, no
problem requires so much priority. No problem is devastating societies more than this
one. No other one is even ruining relationships between countries; no strength
produces more fearful problem þboth between producers and usersþ as this does. It is
not a problem to be solved by a single country, nor by a group of countries, nor
unilaterally by producers or users. It is the same challenge for all. No country may boast
absence of guilt, nor wash its conscience as dollars are laundered.
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