4
O
viedo
| C
ampoamor
T
heatre
| 16
th
O
ctober
1984
Excerpt from the speech given on the
occasion of receiving the Prince of
Asturias Award for Ibero-American
Cooperation on 16/10/1984.
Augusto Ramírez Ocampo
(Colombia), on behalf of
the Contadora Group
—
Contadora Group
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Ibero-American
Cooperation 1984
Contadora came into being as the fruit of serene meditation on the destiny of Latin America, in
the midst of the convulsions of the struggle which pretended, by force of arms, to turn that land
—which is also ours— into the scenario of the fight between two major powers. It was, therefore,
a statement about our capacity to decide and is also a system of unity and cooperation of regional
scope. Our conception is not limited to understanding peace as the mere absence of war or of
seeing it as a brief interlude between two armed conflicts. That is how the major powers conceive
it. For them, peace is linked only to the deactivation of nuclear warheads or to achieving a balance
of terror.
For us, peace is a concept which is intimately related to poverty, hunger and injustice. That is
why economic and social issues are as important as disarmament in the Contadora Act. (…) The
Contadora Group does not aim to impose peace in Central America, but simply to help these
countries in conflict to establish it in accordance with their own free will. The difficulty lies in
making conflicting interests accept this approach; this need for a peace based, as Quevedo put
it, “on religion, conscience, and freedom justified by the motherland”. Disarmament, democracy,
development, human rights, the participation of the people and social justice… these are, in short,
the fundamentals of this joint effort which, in San José, found firm institutional support from the
European Community, Spain and Portugal.
