Puerto España, Trinidad y Tobago, April 18 (SP). “Greetings to all of you. I am going to make a statement about three subjects:
A fundamental subject, which we think we have to face in order to face economic crisis; a subject related to the United States and Cuba’s subject.

Economic Crisis

To face economic crisis is urgent for all our countries to have access to all the required resources, to multilateral organizations, to be able to avoid the biggest damages of this crisis.

For example, in order to be able to finance the social network protection in each country, to protect the poorest, so poor people would not assume the consequences of this crisis that the poor people have not created.

We have said that if there is no opportune financing in the right levels, to finance social protection policies in this crisis, the countries can fall in anarchy which can create more violence, or the countries can desperately look for financing sources that are too expensive, short term, that may produce a new debt crisis and then the crisis of the economy will be followed by a debt crisis.

That is why we need processes, urgently, as the capitalization of the Inter American Bank.

The United States

I had the privilege to be next to President Obama during lunch, and I had the opportunity of talked widely with him about general subjects of the continent and specific subjects about Colombia.

We found great receptiveness to advance in all the subjects of our bilateral agenda, a great support.

In the next days we will have a meeting in Washington to go through all the subjects: Plan Colombia, Free Trade agreement, which is crucial to Colombia; our progress in education, health, all the effort that we do in the social policy.

President Obama announced to me that in his next trip to Latin America he will visit Colombia. And I told him –because you know that concerning to these subjects I use to be very prudent and I usually only say how constructive the meeting was- I told him: ‘President, ¿can I tell?’ He told me: ‘Say it’. Of course, dates can not be compromised yet.

I think that the governments and the countries must have elemental visions.

During lunch I told him that the key word that we look for in Colombia is trust, based on security with democratic values, investment with social responsibility and social cohesion.

I showed President Obama an explample of each one: ‘Look President, our effort to protect Union Trade Members. Look the number of murders before our government. ¿And what has happened in our government? ‘and I told him ‘But we are not happy. We want to get to a moment of no one single murder of a worker in Colombia, as we have accomplished with journalist: we have been two year with no murders of journalist in Colombia.

I told him: ‘President, we are fighting against impunity’ and I showed how we have changed from two convictions of workers’ murderers to 184 convictions, and how we have in jail 173 killers of workers.

I told him: ‘President, about social cohesion.’ I showed him how we have progress in health insurance, with 45 million of inhabitants; we are reaching the 41 million with health insurances. Of them, more than 23 million are receiving total subsidies for that insurance from the State and 18 million beneficiaries of the formal sector of the economy; employees pay 8 and a half points; workers pay 4 points for health.

I showed President Obama, shared with him the growth of Sena. I told him: ‘President, as you have said, we need to train our citizens for new jobs’. We looked these numbers of the enormous growth of the National Learning Service in Colombia.

And, very kindly, he put his signature here, with a nice dedicatory for this that I called “The elemental Government’s guide book”
‘To President Uribe, with admiration.
Barack Obama.’

I wrote to him in confidence: (…) Security with democratic values, investment with social responsibility and social cohesion”