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THE AMERICAS IN A CHANGING WORLD

During his trip to Latin America in February, Secretary Kissinger spoke before the U.S.-Venezuelan Symposium II in Macuto, Venezuela. A transcript of his address, delivered on February 17, follows:

I am most pleased to be here today, at the invitation of President Perez. This Symposium is symbolic of the effort of our two nations to strengthen our ties, and to consult on issues of deep concern to our two peoples. I come here not merely to demonstrate my country's interest in its relationships with you, but to address with you the global challenges to our common future.

The Western Hemisphere has for centuries symbolized man's readiness to grasp his own destiny. When I placed a wreath at the Tomb of Simon Bolivar yesterday, I recalled the depth of his faith and wonder at the future of the Americas. Today, more than a century later, the promise of our hemisphere is more alive than everand the compelling responsibility we face today and tomorrow.

Today I want to discuss with you the challenges that history has posed to our hemispheric friendship, the efforts we have made in the recent period to address these challenges, and the compelling responsibility we face today and tomorrow.

Our special relationship

I have come to this continent because the United States believes that Latin America has a special place in our foreign policy.

This belief is the product of history. We won our national independence together in the same era. We confronted the similar challenges of pioneer peoples developing the resources of bountiful unexplored continents. We shaped democratic institutions and spurred economic growth, conscious that we benefitted greatly from our relationship with each other. We have long shared a common interest in shielding our hemisphere from the intrusion of others. We led the world in building international organizations to serve our cooperative endeavors for both collective security and economic progress.

with Latin America a special intimacy, a special bond of collaboration, even in the periods of our isolation from world affairs. Even now, when our countries are major participants in world affairs, when our perceptions of contemporary issues are not always identical, there remains a particular warmth in the personal relationships among our leaders and a special readiness to consider the views of our neighbors. On many issues of United States policy-economic, political or security-the American people and Congress give special consideration to our hemispheric ties.

The problem we face today is that history and indeed the very growth and success we have all achievedhave complicated our relationship. What used to be a simple perception of hemispheric uniqueness, and a self-contained exclusive relationship, has become enmeshed in wider concerns we all now have in the rest of the world.

The United States is conscious of a global responsibility to maintain the world balance of power, to help resolve the age-old political conflicts that undermine peace, and to help shape a new international order encompassing the interests and aspirations of the 150 nations that now comprise our planet. And so our vision now reaches beyond the Western Hemisphere. We have major alliances with the Atlantic community and Japan, as well as this hemisphere; we have growing ties of friendship with many nations. In a nuclear age, we have an inescapable responsibility to manage and stabilize our relations with the major communist powers, with the major communist powers, and to try to build a safe and more constructive future. The problem of peace in this generation means for us, the United States, a permanent involvement in world affairs in all their dimensions-maintaining security, promoting a healthy trade and monetary system and economic development, and creating a stable and just and universal system of political relations.

At the same time, Latin American nations have grown in power and influence and become major forces in their own right on the world scene. The United States has always felt This is one of the most striking events

of this era. Your economies are among the most advanced of the developing world. But your role is not a product of economic strength alone; its roots are deeper-your traditions of personal and national dignity, concern for legal principle, and your history of peace; your sense and a growing sense of solidarity with developing nations in Africa and Asia. Such global involvement is inevitable; inevitably also, it creates new and conflicting pressures on more traditional friendships.

The challenge of economic development has become a worldwide concern and is being addressed on a global, and not simply hemispheric basis. Venezuela is now co-chairman of the Conference on International Economic Cooperation and has discharged this responsibility with great wisdom. Similarly, the energies of the United States are increasingly focused on international organizations and issues of global scope. We have made major and comprehensive proposals to the UN General Assembly Special Session, the World Food Conference, and the Conference on International Economic Cooperation. Recent events have taught us all that global prosperity is indivisible; no nation can prosper alone.

Finally, the United States continues in this era to feel a special concern for its hemispheric relations. Our profound conviction is that if we cannot help to solve the burning issues of peace and progress with those with whom we have such long-standing ties of sentiment and experience of collaboration, we have little hope of helping to solve them elsewhere.

To put it positively, we feel strongly that our cooperation as equals in this hemisphere can be a model for cooperation in the world arena. The challenge we face is that we must reconcile these distinct but intersecting dimensions of concern. We must define anew the nature and purposes of our hemispheric condition. We must understand its meaning and its promise. We must adapt it to our new global condition. We must summon it, develop it, and use it for our common objectives.

The United States values its bilateral ties with your countries, without

any intention of pursuing them in order to break up your regional solidarity. We want to preserve our hemispheric ties and adapt them to the moral imperatives of this era, without hegemony, free of complexes, aimed at a better future.

All the nations of the hemisphere are mature countries. The variety of intersecting relationships and concerns reflects the vitality of our nations and the increasingly important roles we play in the world. We in the Americas are granted by history a unique opportunity to help fashion what your Foreign Minister has called a "new equilibrium" among all nations.

Dialogue and progress

The experience of our recent past has much to teach us. During the early 1960's, the Alliance for Progress stimulated great expectations of rapid development. The enthusiasm with which our countries embraced the Alliance Charter clearly exceeded our collective perseverance and understated the magnitude of the challenge. But great human and financial resources were mobilized; new institutions were created that remain basic instruments for cooperation. And ultimately the Alliance left an even greater moral imprint. By the end of the 1960's, internal development and social change had become an imperative for all governments in Latin America, regardless of political coloration. The United States is proud of its contribution.

In this decade, this hemisphere has been swept up in the tides of the global economy that now have an increasing significance to our national plans and expectations.

At Vina del Mar in 1969, the nations of Latin America staked out a new agenda of issues reflecting what we have since come to call interdependence-the conditions of world trade, multinational corporations, and technology transfer-as well as more traditional issues such as economic assistance. In the spirit of inter-American cooperation, the United States attempted to respond. My government endorsed, and worked for, measures to improve Latin America's access to our markets

The Secretary's trip to
Latin America

Secretary Kissinger returned to Washington February 24 after a busy, eight-day visit to six Latin American countries-Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

During his first stop, in Caracas on February 17, Dr. Kissinger made a major policy address on inter-American relations. In Brazil he signed an agreement in which Brazil and the United States pledged to consult each other on all major international issues as well as mutual ones. The Secretary also met with leaders in Peru, Colombia and Peru to discuss current issues.

Enroute to Washington, the Secretary stopped in Guatemala on February 24 to tour some of the areas which were hard hit by the recent earthquakes.

and those of other industrial coun

tries, to improve the flow of private capital, to reform the inter-American system and to ensure consideration for Latin American concerns in international forums.

Less than a month after becoming Secretary of State in 1973, I called for a new dialogue between Latin America and the United States to reinvigorate our relations by addressing together the new challenges of an interdependent world. I believed that in the past the United States had too often sought to decide unilaterally what should be done about interAmerican relations. I felt that Latin America must have a stake in our policies if those policies were to be successful. I said we were ready to listen to all Latin American concerns in any forum.

Latin America chose to conduct the dialogue on a strictly multilateral basis, presenting common positions to the United States. First in Bogota, then in Mexico City, the agenda of issues that had been set out in Vina del Mar was updated to account for changed circumstances and new con

cerns.

At Tlatelolco, and again in Washington, I joined my fellow

Foreign Ministers in informal meetings, supplementing our regular encounters in the OAS and the United Nations. A thorough and heartening dialogue took place. For the next twelve months, United States and Latin American representatives met in a continuous series of political and technical discussions. These meetings were interrupted almost precisely a year ago, in reaction to certain provisions of the United States Trade Act of 1974-the very Act that implemented the system of generalized preferences first proposed in Vina del Mar.

All of us have something to learn. from this experience. First, we can now see that the new dialogue, as it was conducted, only partially met the psychological requirements of our modern relationship.

The United States was prepared to work with other nations of the hemisphere to improve and perfect the undeniable community that has existed under the name of the inter-American system for almost a century. Yet the explicitness of our approach to the concept of community led many in Latin America to think that the United States wanted to maintain or create a relationship of hegemony. This misunderstanding obscured the reality that the hemisphere was in transition, between dependence and interdependence, between consolidation and political growth, and that the old community based on exclusivity was being transformed into a more open community based on mutual interests and problem solving.

The United States, perhaps underestimating the psychological weight of history, had conceived a dialogue as a means of adjusting its policies through compromises arising from a common search for solutions with Latin America.

The Latin American nations still seemed to think that the United States, with its great strengths and responsibilities, could act unilaterally to resolve all issues, that any compromise was surrender, that Latin America should propose and the United States should respond. The United States, on the other hand, looked upon dialogue as a prolonged process of give-andtake, in which progress would come

incrementally, as our representatives analyzed the problems and negotiated solutions.

Latin America demanded quick results: each meeting became a deadline by which time the United States had to show "results" or be judged lacking. But as economic difficulties beset us

all in a period of world recession, it

became obvious that if Latin American aspirations were expressed to the people of the United States in terms of categorical and propagandistic demands, they could not elicit a sufficiently positive response.

Both sides oversimplified the nature of the problem: the Latin American nations did not always perceive that the issues were among the most difficult that the international community has faced, because they go to the heart of the structure and interaction of entire societies. The United States did not sufficiently take into account that Latin America had experienced years of frustration in which lofty promises by the United States had been undone by the gradualism of the American political system, which responds less to abstract commitments than to concrete

new hemispheric equilibrium be borne wholly by the United States. We are prepared to make a major contribution, and we are willing to cooperate fully with Latin American regional institutions that come into being to this end.

But both sides need a new ap

proach. The United States is prepared to give more systematic consideration to Latin America's quest for regional identity. On the other hand, Latin America must overcome its own ap

prehensions about our policies. In the past, whenever we emphasized the regional aspects of our relationships, we have been accused of forcing problems into an inter-American system which we dominated; when we emphasized the bilateral mode, we were accused of a policy of divide and rule. Each side must understand the problems and purposes of the other.

We thus all know our challenge. We must now turn it into our opportunity. As far as the United States is concerned, we are prepared to make a major effort to build upon our historic ties a cooperative effort to construct a better future.

common future

problems. Hence the charge of neglect Interdependence and our on one side and the occasional feeling on the other side, of being beseiged with demands.

But if the new dialogue has not yet yielded results, it nevertheless expresses a constructive mode of dealing with our problems and realizing the aspirations of the hemisphere. The United States is prepared to make a major effort to invigorate our hemispheric ties. My trip here underlines that purpose.

We have learned something basic about the hemisphere itself. In the past, both the United States and Latin America have acted as if the problems of the hemisphere could be solved exclusively within the hemisphere. Today, the Americas-North and South-recognize that they require a global as well as a regional vision if they are to resolve their problems. For the United States a homogeneous policy toward an entity called "Latin America" presents new problems, in terms both of global concerns and of the real diversity of Latin America. Nor can the burden of adjustment to a

Where do we go from here? What is the answer? Wherein lies the purpose of our relationship in the modern era?

Our starting point must be to recognize that an era of interdependence makes collaborative endeavor more, not less, important to any country that wishes to preserve control over its own national destiny.

We in this hemisphere won our glory in fighting for national independence and defending it in the face of foreign threats; we have built societies embodying the tradition of democracy; we have dedicated our human energies to the development of our natural resources, with impressive results.

Yet even as we celebrate our birth as nations and our centuries of achievement, we encounter a new challenge to our independence. It comes not from foreign armies, but from gaps and strains revealed within the very international economic sys

tem that each of our nations, in its own way, has done much to create.

Since the Enlightenment, which produced the faith in reason and progress that inspired our revolutions, we have all believed that the growth of a global economy would nurture a world community bringing universal advancement. Yet now we find that the international system of production-which still has the potential to provide material progress for all-has become subject to uncertainties and inefficiencies and international conflicts.

Nowhere is this challenge more vivid than in Latin America. With the higher stage of development that your economies have reached has come the awareness of greater vulnerability to fluctuations in export earnings, to increases in costs of imports, and to the ebb and flow of private capital. Yet your more complex and more open economies can also respond more vigorously to, and profit more readily from, positive trends in the world economic system.

Interdependence for the Americas is therefore a positive force, and an opportunity. We must manage it, harness it, and develop it for our common benefit.

Our economic dilemmas give rise, in our times, to political imperatives. Rapidly changing external events affect all our peoples profoundly-their livelihoods, their material standards, their hopes for the future, and most fundamentally, their confidence that our systems of government can successfully encounter the challenges before us. And the requirement for action is political will.

Our societies derive their strength from the consent and dedication of our peoples. Can our democratic system. cope with the strains of social change and the frustrations of what is inevitably a long historical process? Can nations find the wisest path in an era when our problems are too vast to be solved by any nation acting alone? Will we succumb to the temptation of unilateral actions, advantageous in their appearance but not their reality? Can we reconcile our diversity and the imperative of our collaboration?

I believe we have every cause for optimism. The requirements of inter

dependence make patent the genius of our special hemispheric traditions, values, and our institutions. Pluralism and respect for the rights of others are indispensable to the harmony of the international order. For to seek to impose radical changes without the consent of all those who would be affected is to ignore political reality. Equally, to deny a voice to any who are members of the international community is to ensure that even positive achievement will ultimately be rejected.

Therefore the traditions of this hemisphere-democracy, justice, human and national dignity, and free cooperation are precisely the qualities needed in the era of global interdependence. National unity without freedom is sterile; technological progress without social justice is corrupt; nationalism without a consciousness of the human community is a negative force.

Therefore, our permanent quest for progress in this hemisphere must take into account global as well as regional realities. It must reflect the differing interests of each country. And our global efforts respectively must draw on the vitality of our own reltionships as a source of dynamism, strength, and inspiration.

The United States has attempted to make a constructive contribution, in this context.

Last September in New York, addressing the Latin American Foreign Ministers attending the UN General Assembly, I pointed out that several of our initiatives before the Seventh Special Session had been designed to be particularly relevant to Latin American concerns. And I pledged that in the necessary negotiations in other forums, and in all aspects of our relations, we would remember that each Latin American country was different, and we would be responsive to the distinctive national interests of our friends in the hemisphere.

My New York comments raised contradictory speculations. The explicit introduction of global considerations into our Latin American policy was variously interpreted as implying either that the United States denied the existence of a special relationship with Latin America, or that it

sought to build on that relationship to constitute a new bloc in world affairs. The recognition of the uniqueness of each country, and particularly my statement that "no single formula" could encompass our desire for warm and productive relations with each nation in the hemisphere, were interpreted by some to imply that the United States was about to embark on a new crusade to maintain its power through a policy of special bilateral deals designed to divide the countries of Latin America against each other and preclude their ties with countries outside the hemisphere.

These speculations reflect the suspicions and uncertainties of a fluid global environment. They reflect problems we must jointly overcome. They do not reflect United States polThey do not reflect United States policy.

The fundamental interests of the United States require an active and constructive role of leadership in the task of building peace and promoting economic advance. In this hemisphere, the legacy of our history is a tradition of civilized cooperation, a habit of interdependence, that is a sturdy foundation on which to seek to build a more just international order. And it is absurd to attempt to create a broader world community by tearing down close cooperative relations that have already existed in our part of the globe.

Therefore, the United States remains committed to our common pledge at Tlatelolco to seek “a new, vigorous spirit of inter-American solidarity." This must mean today not an artificial unanimity or unrealistic pleas for unilateral action. As we agreed at Tlatelolco, interdependence has become a physical and moral imperative: it is a reality of mutual dependence and a necessity of cooperation on common problems. To face real problems, we must now deal effectively among ourselves, we must identify our real needs and priorities; given the hemisphere's diversity, that can often be achieved bilaterally and subregionally better than regionally.

In this spirit of working solidarity, the United States pledges to take special cognizance of the distinctive requirements of the more industralized economies of Latin America, and of

the region as a whole, in our efforts to build a more equitable international order. We believe the major Latin American countries need concessional foreign assistance less than they need support for their drive to participate in the international economy on a more equal footing with the industrialized nations. To help overcome fluctuations in export earnings and continued import and debt-servicing needs, we have secured a development security facility in the IMF and a substantial increase in access to IMF resources. To facilitate access to long-term development capital on commercial terms, we have proposed a new international investment trust and have

begun a program of technical assistance to countries entering established capital markets.

In a similar vein, we support expanded capitalization of international financial institutions such as the International Finance Corporation and the Inter-American Development Bank. A U. S. contribution of $2.25 billion to a new multi-year replenishment of the Inter-American Development Bank is now before the U. S. Congress. President Ford has given his full support.

To promote the growth and market stability of commodities of importance to Latin America, we favor producer-consumer cooperation in specific commodities, and a reduction in the barriers to increased processing of raw materials in exporting countries.

We are prepared to undertake other practical steps:

The nations of Latin America have shown considerable interest in the transfer of modern technology. We support this, in principle and in practice. The challenge here, as elsewhere, is to develop mechanisms to achieve practical results. It may be that SELA can turn to this question and suggest the means by which we could cooperate. We are prepared to respond positively.

In addition, we must recognize that the private sector, private initiative, and private capital can play important roles in the development and application of new scientific and technological advances to local needs and conditions. The degree to which private