CÚPULA DA AMÉRICA LATINA E DO CARIBE SOBRE ... - Funag

INTERVENÇÕES (VERSÃO ORIGINAL)
extremely grateful for your efforts over the years to involve CARICOM in the
Latin American integration process, and we are particularly grateful for the
role that you have played in bringing Suriname and Guyana into UNASUR.
However, despite these efforts, our regions, in spite of hundreds of years of
history together in the Western Hemisphere, still remain distinctly separate
too separate. And we can come here and denounce the United States of
America and Europe, and I feel they are needed on the scene for the role they
have played in our underdevelopment. But we are not going to make a
difference, we are not going to change this, unless we have the political will to
come together. No one in this world owes us a free lunch in spite of history.
Europe does not owe a free lunch, or the United States of America. We will
get what we want from this world only if we take it, and we must have the will
to do so.
I am happy that we are here because many times we don’t get this
opportunity to talk frankly to our colleagues from Latin America. And I
hope that at the end of today we have a better understanding of the
challenges that we face as regions through our own eyes, through our
own words, because often our views of each other are formed through
the media, an often times unsympathetic media. As you know, CARICOM
is a union of 15 countries and, outside of the European Union, the oldest
integration movement. We have over 40 years of integration efforts. We
have moved from a loose arrangement into a free trade area and more
recently set ourselves the goal of establishing a single market and economy.
We have achieved the single market and have set 2015 as the deadline
for the introduction of the single economy. So we are making progress
towards bringing our economies together, and this is out of necessity
because we are many small countries.
We cannot address the challenges of this world on our own. We are
simply too small for that. And often the difficulties that are faced, and we
speak now of the economic crisis, are magnified in small economies like ours.
We have even gone further in CARICOM than the OECS countries, a small
group of countries which has had a successful monetary union for decades.
Yet, often in our efforts at regional integration we look to the successes of
others, when within our own Hemisphere we have models that have worked
and are working fairly well. This is why you see when we get together, the
CARICOM countries get together twice a year, we tend to act together. We
vote together on candidates for the most part, and because we are 15 countries,
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