Clinton Cites Trade, Migration at Summit

President Clinton, the leaders of six Central American nations and the head of the Dominican Republic agreed Thursday on the need to find “humanitarian solutions” to the problems posed by migration to the United States and pledged to work together to eliminate remaining trade barriers.

Completing a one-day summit here, Clinton saluted the “monument of peace” that is being created in the region and said his administration will support debt-relief measures and job-producing trade between the United States and Central America.

“We are determined to see the region emerge from adversity in a way that places all of us on higher ground,” the president said. “Central America, for all its adversity, is being well-managed.”

The summit capped his four-day trip to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala--nations often ignored by U.S. presidents until natural disaster or political upheaval force them onto Washington’s agenda.

President Johnson visited Central America, as have successors, but, Clinton pointed out, Johnson never left the airport during his visit to Guatemala.

The region, torn by civil wars, decades of repression and, recently, the devastation of tropical storm Mitch, has turned toward democracy and open-market economies.

Clinton’s trip reflects a concerted effort by the United States to reengage itself here as a force for positive change.

Clinton and the other seven leaders--presidents Alvaro Arzu of Guatemala, Arnoldo Aleman of Nicaragua, Miguel Angel Rodriguez of Costa Rica, Armando Calderon Sol of El Salvador, Carlos Flores of Honduras and Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic, and Prime Minister Said Wilbert Musa of Belize--met at the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, constructed from the remnants of a Dominican convent established in the mid-16th century shortly after the start of Spanish colonization.

Clinton spoke in a courtyard with a fountain bubbling nearby and the peak of the approximately 12,000-foot-high Agua volcano looming in the distance.

Antigua is about 25 miles from Guatemala City, the capital, but the trip over winding, mountainous roads takes nearly an hour. Clinton arrived Wednesday afternoon and spent about an hour shopping in a store selling jade jewelry. He purchased two necklaces and several replicas of Maya pottery, said Maria Elena Streicher, the store’s sales manager. On Thursday morning Clinton was driven through town, passing clusters of women in colorful traditional garb who waved at him at the town’s main square.

Pledges of cooperation and congratulatory tenor notwithstanding, the United States and the nations of Central America have decades of tension and misunderstanding to overcome, not to mention the ongoing disputes over immigration and trade stemming from the region’s endemic poverty.

“We have recognized we need to look for humanitarian solutions,” Aleman said.

Clinton said at the meeting’s start that the challenge in rebuilding after tropical storm Mitch, which took 9,000 lives and left almost as many missing, “is to consolidate the remarkable achievements of Central America in the last decade, to build on them and to accelerate them.”

“Central America has had a long and difficult season, aggravated by the recent hurricanes,” the president said, referring to the political and economic turmoil of much of the past century.

“But we can truly rejoice that the springtime of renewal and rebuilding is here.”