Christopher Pushes Central American Ties

In a major address before El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Monday called for stronger ties between the United States and Central America to expand trade and strengthen still-struggling democracies in the region.

He also pledged greater U.S. support on crime and counter-narcotics programs, immigration issues and environmental problems to consolidate recent political and economic gains.

“The road ahead will be as difficult as it is rewarding,” Christopher said. “By working together, we can build an integrated hemisphere whose free peoples are united in hope and progress and whose nations enjoy the benefits of stability, prosperity and democracy.”

El Salvador is the first stop on an eight-day tour that will also take Christopher to Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Trinidad. The Latin American tour, the first by an American secretary of state in eight years, will feature a number of initiatives intended to heighten U.S. involvement in the region.

“Democracy and open markets are not just ends in themselves,” Christopher told the assembly in a broad outline of U.S. policy on Central America. “We can now join forces to advance other common goals.”

To spur economic integration in Central America, the Clinton administration will push hard this year to win congressional support for extending trade preferences on key exports from 26 Central American and Caribbean countries to the United States, Christopher said.

The trade initiative, to cover petroleum, textile, apparel and footwear products, would provide the kind of special trade status to members of the Caribbean Basin Initiative now granted to Canada and Mexico as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The administration has twice pushed for similar measures--unsuccessfully. But the White House decision to include the measure in the March budget proposal reflects the president’s commitment to winning its passage, according to U.S. officials traveling with Christopher.

Salvadoran President Armando Calderon Sol hailed the step as a demonstration of the Clinton administration’s good intentions toward the region, “espoused at a difficult political time”--a reference to heated election-year debate on free trade.

“We are not absolutely confident that the measure will pass right away, this year. But we are fully confident in the will of the Clinton administration to push this initiative through . . . after this political moment is over,” Calderon said.

The partial economic integration will also help pave the way for a Free Trade Area of the Americas that will eliminate trade barriers between all North, Central and South American countries by the year 2005, an idea endorsed at the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami.

In talks with Calderon, Christopher also provided assurances that there will be no mass deportations of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans now in the United States illegally, according to senior U.S. officials.

Christopher also signed a $10-million agreement to help El Salvador finish redistributing agricultural land to 35,000 former combatants in the country’s civil war and to squatters in former war zones. The funds will also provide technical assistance to farmers and funding for small businesses.

On other problems, the administration has pledged to send out an interagency team to coordinate anticrime efforts in specific areas, such as stolen cars that are transported across borders, and to help train police officers and provide equipment to help with drug detection.