Honduras, 2007

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.