General Assembly

Distr. GENERAL  

19 September 1996

ORIGINAL:
SPANISH

                                                        A/51/375

General Assembly
Fifty-first session
Items 27, 78, 96, 98, 99 and 104
  of the provisional agenda*

*    A/51/150.


      NECESSITY OF ENDING THE ECONOMIC, COMMERCIAL AND FINANCIAL EMBARGO
             IMPOSED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AGAINST CUBA

         CONSOLIDATION OF THE REGIME ESTABLISHED BY THE TREATY FOR THE
         PROHIBITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE      
                       CARIBBEAN (TREATY OF TLATELOLCO)

                        MACROECONOMIC POLICY QUESTIONS

        SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC COOPERATION

                    ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

                          INTERNATIONAL DRUG CONTROL

      Letter dated 13 September 1996 from the Permanent Representative of
       Bolivia to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General


     As Coordinator of the States members of the Rio Group, I have the
honour to submit herewith the Declaration of the Tenth Summit of Heads
of State and Government of the Rio Group, held at Cochabamba, Bolivia,
on 3 and 4 September 1996.

     I should be grateful if you would have this letter and its annex
circulated as a document of the General Assembly under items 27, 78,
96, 98, 99 and 104 of the provisional agenda.


                                         (Signed)  Edgar CAMACHO-OMISTE
                                                        Ambassador
                                                  Permanent Representative


                                     ANNEX

                  Declaration of the Tenth Summit of Heads of
                     State and Government of the Rio Group


     We, the heads of State and Government of the Rio Group, meeting in
the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, on 3 and 4 September 1996, the year
commemorating the tenth anniversary of the creation of this Permanent
Mechanism for Consultation and Concerted Political Action, note with
satisfaction that:

     -   Our goals, including the strengthening of concerted political
         action and coordination, are being fully met.  During these
         years of continuing dialogue, the Mechanism has efficiently
         represented the interests of Latin America and the Caribbean
         and has thus become a fundamental factor in regional unity
         and solidarity;

     -   The Rio Group has contributed to the defence and
         consolidation of representative democracy and human rights,
         principles which our peoples consider to be essential;

     -   The Group has become a recognized participant in
         international relations and maintains a continuing and
         increasingly broad dialogue with other regions and countries
         of the world;

     -   The Group has steadfastly supported and promoted regional
         integration processes, whose substantial progress can be seen
         in the increase in intraregional trade and investment;

     -   Our region has made significant headway in combating drug
         trafficking, corruption and terrorism.  This is evident in
         the signing, at Caracas, of the Inter-American Convention
         against Corruption, the results of the Inter-American
         Specialized Conference on Terrorism held at Lima and the
         progress made in elaborating a hemisphere-wide strategy to
         combat drug trafficking and related crimes under the auspices
         of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission;

     -   The region has become the first nuclear-weapon-free zone with
         the entry into force of the Treaty for the Prohibition of
         Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean.

     Encouraged by the productive results of the past 10 years, we of
the Rio Group agree, on the basis of the democratic ideals which
characterize our actions, to strengthen the procedures for
consultation and concerted action with which we follow up and
coordinate our positions in dealing with the items on the
international agenda.

     Stressing the richness and ethnic and cultural diversity of our
region and its deep unity of purpose and interests, we have agreed on
the following:


             Declaration on the Tenth Anniversary of the Rio Group

Representative democracy and efforts to fight poverty

     As a priority task of our countries, we endorse the promotion of
representative democracy as a system of government and confirm our
political will to continue to defend it while respecting the
sovereignty of States, in accordance with the commitments undertaken
by the Rio Group at Acapulco in 1987 and by the General Assembly of
the Organization of American States at Santiago in 1991.  We reaffirm,
in that context, our determination to overcome poverty, malnutrition,
marginalization, lack of access to health services, and illiteracy,
through policies geared to promoting sustainable medium- and long-term
economic development.

     We urge the international financial institutions to strengthen
their support for our countries in the fight against poverty by
providing both resources and technical assistance to national
programmes.

     We undertake to pursue our policies to encourage economic agents,
in particular small and medium-sized enterprises, to create
productive, decently paid jobs and to promote, as a basic priority,
education, training and skills-improvement for the most vulnerable
sectors of our populations.

Sustainable development

     We confirm our belief that Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development, has established the
principles of sustainable development.  Accordingly, we not only
commit our own efforts but also call on international, hemispheric and
regional intergovernmental organizations to participate actively in
organizing and following up the tasks to ensure that the summit on
sustainable development to be held in Bolivia on 7 and 8 December 1996
is a historic occasion, laying the foundations of a hemispheric agenda
for sustainable development that will be the core of national and
international actions geared to meeting economic, social and
environmental objectives.  In addition, we reaffirm the importance of
committing fresh, additional resources to financing the plan of action
to be adopted at that summit.

Integration and trade

     We reaffirm the importance of integrating our economies in order
to reach higher levels of growth and economic and social development
and to ensure that the region participates more effectively in the
world economy.  In this decade we have made substantial progress in
reactivating subregional integration processes, as evinced by the
strengthening of the Central American Common Market, the Caribbean
Common Market and the Andean Common Market and the creation of new
mechanisms such as the Group of Three, the Southern Cone Common
Market, the Association of Caribbean States and the many bilateral
free-trade agreements that either have been signed or are being
negotiated.  This has meant a substantial increase in intraregional
trade from 1990 to 1996.

     We renew our countries' commitment to an open, non-discriminatory
and transparent multilateral free-trade system, in which the opening
up of markets and the elimination of barriers encourage the
comparative advantages of our economies and foster their competitive
position in the world economy.  In that context, we underline the
importance of the first ministerial conference of the World Trade
Organization, to be held at Singapore in December 1996, and our
authorities' participation in consultations on the agenda for that
meeting.

     We reaffirm the importance of the Rio Group's considerable
participation in the follow-up and implementation of the decisions of
the Summit of the Americas.  In that connection, we note that the next
summit meeting will be held at Santiago, Chile.

     We reiterate our commitment to the Plan of Action of the Summit of
the Americas, which sets as a target the achievement of a free-trade
area for the Americas by 2005.

     We draw attention to the recent establishment of a high-level
committee which has been asked, together with the Latin American
Parliament, to prepare a working agenda and to promote studies on the
creation of a Latin American community of nations, which will be
submitted to Governments in due time.

     We express our commitment to the elaboration and implementation of
a strategy for the physical integration of the region, aware of the
urgent task of developing an adequate transport and communications
infrastructure, and we therefore call on the competent national
authorities to pursue their efforts in that direction.

Extraterritoriality of domestic laws

     We reject any attempt to impose unilateral sanctions of an
extraterritorial nature in application of a country's domestic law, as
this contravenes the rules governing the coexistence of States and
ignores the basic principle of respect for sovereignty, in addition to
constituting a violation of international law.

     We therefore reaffirm our vigorous rejection of the so-called
Helms-Burton Act and, in that connection, stress the importance of the
unanimous view expressed by the Inter-American Juridical Committee of
the Organization of American States, which we endorse, to the effect
that the bases and the prospective enforcement of that Act are
inconsistent with international law.

Dialogue between the Rio Group and the European Union

     We recognize that the institutionalized dialogue between the Rio
Group and the European Union, in the five years since it was
initiated, has fostered a fruitful rapprochement between the two
regions which, in turn, has led to the establishment of other
invaluable mechanisms of political and economic dialogue between
subregions and countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and the
European Union.

Efforts to combat drug trafficking and related crimes

     We call upon the international community to intensify dialogue and
cooperation in efforts to combat the consumption, production,
trafficking and distribution of illegal drugs, as well as related
crimes, including the diversion of chemical precursors, money-
laundering and illicit arms trafficking.  Full observance of the
principle of shared responsibility will lead to more effective results
that reflect a comprehensive and balanced view of the drug problem,
which will enable us to interlink national, regional and global
efforts, in accordance with the principles of international law.

     We reiterate that a comprehensive strategy in the fight against
drugs must include the social and economic aspects of the phenomenon,
to which end efforts must be directed towards alternative social and
regional development programmes designed to help improve the living
conditions of the rural families affected.

     The special session of the United Nations General Assembly on the
problem of illicit drugs and related crimes, to be held in 1998,
should help to achieve these objectives.  In this context, we have
decided to instruct the Rio Group's Ad Hoc Working Group on Drugs to
embark on a study of the main points of the agenda for that session.

Inter-American Convention against Corruption

     Considering that the Inter-American Convention against Corruption
is the first international instrument to combat this scourge, placing
our region at the forefront of initiatives of this type, we pledge to
take the necessary steps to ensure that the Convention is ratified
promptly by the corresponding legislative bodies and that the
cooperation mechanisms it envisages are put into practice.

Cultural integration

     Convinced of the importance of culture as a factor which
integrates our peoples, and bearing in mind that the diversity of
Latin American and Caribbean culture projects the true wealth of our
societies, we hereby instruct the competent government authorities of
the countries of the Rio Group to meet, as soon as possible, to design
a plan of action on information and cooperation for cultural
integration in the region.

     We have agreed to hold the Eleventh Meeting of Heads of State and
Government at Asuncio'n, Republic of Paraguay, in the first week of
September 1997.

     Our Ministers for Foreign Affairs shall be responsible for the
systematic follow-up of the decisions taken by the Group, through the
secretariat pro tempore and the Troika.

     We, the heads of State and Government meeting at Cochabamba, wish
to express our thanks and congratulations to the President of the
Republic of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sa'nchez de Lozada, to his Government and
to the people of Bolivia for their hospitality and for the excellent
organization and conduct of the tenth summit of the Permanent
Mechanism for Consultation and Concerted Political Action.


(Signed)  Dr. Carlos Sau'l MENEM      (Signed)  Gonzalo SA'NCHEZ de LOZADA
  President of Argentina                  President of Bolivia

(Signed)  Fernando Henrique CARDOSO   (Signed)  Eduardo FREI RUIZ-TAGLE
  President of Brazil                     President of Chile

(Signed)  Ernesto SAMPER PIZANO       (Signed)  Fernando NARANJO VILLALOBOS
  President of Colombia                   Minister for Foreign Affairs
                                          of Costa Rica
(Signed)  Abdala' BUCARAM ORTIZ           (Representing the Central American
  President of Ecuador                    countries)

(Signed)  Ernesto PE'REZ BALLADARES    (Signed) Ernesto ZEDILLO PONCE de LEO'N
  President of Panama                     President of Mexico

(Signed)  Alberto FUJIMORI FUJIMORI     (Signed)  Juan Carlos WASMOSY
  President of Peru                       President of Paraguay

(Signed)  Hugo BATALLA PARENTINI        (Signed)  Basdeo PANDAY
  Vice-President of Uruguay             Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
                                          (Representing CARICOM)

                                        (Signed)  Rafael CALDERA
                                          President of Venezuela


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