[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 10 (Monday, March 15, 1999)]
[Pages 391-395]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in San Salvador

March 10, 1999

    To the president of the Legislative Assembly, thank you very much 
for your welcome and your fine comments. To the president of the Supreme 
Court, the leaders and members of the Assembly; to the other leaders 
from Central America who are here; members of the diplomatic corps; 
other distinguished public officials from El Salvador; members of the 
American delegation. Mr. President, I noticed you said you would 
officially certify the results of the recent Presidential elections 
today, so I don't want to jump the gun, but apparently, the President-
elect is here. And I'm delighted to see him as well.
    I have come to Central America with gratitude for our partnership, 
gratitude for the warm reception that my wife received when she came 
here recently, and later the wife of our Vice President, with a 
distinguished delegation of Members of Congress, heads of our Federal 
agencies, members of the White House staff, my new Special Envoy to 
Latin America, former Lieutenant Governor of Florida, Buddy MacKay, and 
others.
    For 2 days now, we have been seeing and speaking with many different 
kinds of people in Nicaragua and Honduras, now in El Salvador, about 
efforts to recover and rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. We have 
met people who have lost everything but hope. I have been moved and 
humbled by their refusal to be defeated in the face of the deaths of 
their children, their husbands, their wives, their parents, the loss of 
all source of income.
    I am very proud and grateful that the United States, through our 
soldiers, our aid workers, and our Peace Corps volunteers, our private 
donations, have had the opportunity to work alongside the people of 
Central America in the rebuilding process.
    The message I have heard from all kinds of people is that it is not 
enough now simply to fix things which were destroyed and move on; that, 
together we must build a better life for future generations, restoring 
people's lives and livelihoods as soon as possible, in a way that 
strengthens freedom and peace and the rule of law over the long run.
    No one can forget that just a few years ago, the people of Central 
America were suffering from a legion of manmade disasters far more cruel 
than anything nature can bestow on us. There was a time not long ago 
when many in this region believed they could only defend their point of 
view at the point of a gun, a time when civil war and repression claimed 
tens of thousands of lives and cast many thousands more into exile, a 
time when farmers were pushed off their land and children were torn from 
their parents, a time which provoked, in the United States, bitter 
divisions about our role in your region.
    You have worked hard here in El Salvador to shed light on that dark 
and painful period. Now, all of us as friends and partners, can and must 
join in building a common future, determined to remember the past but 
never to repeat it.
    I hope the people of Central America now see the United States in a 
new way, as a partner, a friend, a colleague in the process of 
strengthening democracy, in reconstruction, in reclaiming your rightful 
future.
    The wars are over. Every country in Central America now is governed 
by elected leaders accountable to their people. What once was a no-win 
contest for power has turned into a win-win contest for better schools, 
safer streets, and economic opportunity. A battlefield of ideology has 
been transformed into a marketplace of ideas. Decades of struggle have 
brought a victory for democracy, the only revolution of our time that 
has not betrayed its principles.
    In so many other parts of the world things are different. Nations 
still short-change schools and hospitals to pay for arms in the vain 
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction--not in Central America and 
certainly not in El Salvador. In so many other places in the world 
financial turmoil has undermined confidence in open markets and 
societies--not in Central America and certainly

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not in El Salvador. In so many other places people still try to resolve 
ethnic, religious, and political tensions by the force of arms rather 
than the force of argument--not in Central America. And no nation has 
traveled a greater distance to overcome deeper wounds in shorter time 
than El Salvador. You reached another plateau through your elections on 
Sunday.
    A hurricane can transform villages full of life into valleys of 
rubble and death. But it will not wash away the foundations of good 
government and goodwill the people of Central America have laid. It 
cannot, it will not, take away from you the power to shape your own 
destiny.
    All the Central American leaders with whom I have visited have told 
me that if reconstruction is managed in the right way, if it clearly 
benefits all segments of society in a transparent way, if it carves out 
new roles for local government and voluntary organizations, if it 
reflects the necessity of protecting the environment, then this region 
will emerge in stronger shape than before the storm.
    You are striving to build true democracies in which all people have 
a stake and human rights are respected; to build more equitable 
societies that have conquered not only the bitter divide between right 
and left but the embittering divide between poverty and wealth; to build 
safer communities in which people can live in peace and have faith in 
police and judicial institutions; to build a more integrated community 
of the Americas in which boarders are open to travel and trade but 
closed to deadly traffic in drugs and guns and human beings.
    The United States will work with you to realize that vision from 
relief to reconstruction to renewal. It is the right thing to do. 
Clearly, it is in America's interests. Years ago, we learned that when 
Central America suffers, we suffer, too. In the last 10 years, we have 
learned how very much we benefit when Central America prospers in peace. 
Our exports to Central America and trade between us have more than 
tripled in this decade of reconciliation and hope. But to keep rising 
together, we have much more to do.
    First, we need to keep in mind the extent of the challenge just 
before us, the hurricane-damaged infrastructure that will cost $8.5 
billion to repair. Hope cannot be restored by aid alone. We also must 
expand trade and investment to restore growth. I have asked our Congress 
for funds totaling over $950 million to help restore Central America.
    On Friday I sent to Congress a new proposal for an enhanced 
Caribbean Basin Initiative that would provide for Central America and 
the Caribbean even greater benefits than the proposal I made last year 
before the hurricane. It would eliminate our tariffs on all textiles 
assembled here from U.S. fabric, as well as on all textile handicrafts. 
It would allow us, also, to treat all nontextile imports from Central 
America exactly as we treat such imports from Mexico under NAFTA. The 
only requirement is that all nations must meet their obligations under 
the World Trade Organization and participate in the effort to create a 
free-trade area of the Americas.
    Now, if our Congress agrees, clearly this will help people in 
Central America find jobs, market their exports, stand on their feet. It 
will bring us closer to a day when goods move freely from Alaska to the 
tip of South America with benefits to all nations.
    In every country, including the United States, the progress of open 
markets is met by some skepticism and resentment. But look at the facts. 
Hundreds of millions of people on every continent have risen from 
poverty because finally they had the chance to produce goods and 
services for buyers beyond the borders of their nation. This will 
continue if we continue to tear down barriers that shut off countries 
from their customers. Exports have been the main engine of your 
country's growth the last few years. They have helped the United States, 
too. Our expanding trade with Latin America clearly has lifted our own 
growth and limited the impact on us of the global financial crisis.
    As we build a free-trade area of the Americas, however, we must 
remember that trade has to work for ordinary citizens everywhere, to 
contribute both to wealth and fairness. We must build a trading system 
that upholds the rights of workers and consumers, so that

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competition is a race to the top, not the bottom. We must conclude a 
treaty to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world this year.
    But I know it is not enough to keep children out of work. We must 
get them into school in every nation. Today I am pleased to announce 
that the United States will provide over $8 million in new funding to 
help the children of America start school and stay in school.
    I must say, as I drove along the streets of San Salvador today--
first, to see the President and then to come here--I was very moved by 
the friendly faces of people waving to me. But the most touching of all 
were the children that stood out in front of their schools in their 
uniforms with their little signs and their smiling faces. And I could 
only think that our obligation is to give all the children of this 
region the chance to stand in those lines, in those uniforms, and learn 
what they need to know to prosper in the century ahead.
    We must also protect our environment. It is essential to the wealth 
of our nations and the health of our people. One of the central lessons 
of this hurricane is that we have to protect the environment to protect 
people. It was the deforested hillsides, for example, that experienced 
the deadliest mudslides. In places that retained their trees, lives were 
saved.
    Now, we cannot stop hurricanes or earthquakes or storms, but we can 
minimize the damage they do so that every act of God is not a disaster 
of biblical proportions. We can reforest watersheds and preserve 
wetlands. We can grow crops in a way that preserves instead of spends 
the fertility of our soil. We can build more safely for the future. We 
in the United States are providing computer software and aerial imagery 
to Central America to tell you where flooding and mudslides are most 
likely to occur during the next storm, where roads and infrastructures 
must be rebuilt to last.
    But we also can do more. We must join together to stop the warming 
of our planet. Otherwise, there will only be more of the storms, floods, 
droughts, and record-breaking temperatures that have caused so much 
misery in the last few years, not only in our own backyard but 
throughout the world. We can do this together, and we can do it without 
forgoing economic growth. Each year we are developing cleaner 
technologies and cleaner sources of energy.
    For example, here in Central America you have an abundance of 
geothermal energy in hot springs just waiting to be tapped. We simply 
must face the fact--all of us--that in this new information age, nations 
need not, indeed, nations cannot continue to grow their economies by 
clinging to the industrial age energy practices and land management 
practices and water management practices of the past. We can do better. 
And if we do, we will create more jobs and grow our economies faster, 
whether it is in Central America or the United States. And it is a 
critical lesson for the leaders of every nation to teach the people.
    Each time--[applause]--it's okay if you hesitate on that; my 
Congress is not sure I'm right, either. [Laughter] But I am. I can only 
tell you this from our own experience. Each time the United States has 
set higher environmental standards, our businesses have created the 
technologies to meet them, and we have actually had more jobs and faster 
growth as a result. Of course, this has to be done in a sensible way. It 
matters how it is done, but it can be done.
    Healthy market economies, in the end, cannot resist change, they 
must adapt to change. Like protecting the environment, protecting our 
people from drugs and crime is a challenge we must meet together. We 
have come far in the last few years in building a common understanding 
of the drug problem. The United States has recognized that we have a 
fundamental responsibility to reduce demand for drugs. The nations of 
Central America have recognized that drugs cannot pass through a society 
without leaving addiction and crime in their wake. So we are fighting 
the scourge together today for the sake of all our children.
    We also have to join forces to fight the proliferation of small arms 
to criminal gangs. For all the deadly advanced weapons technology in the 
world today, the weapon most responsible for the most death and 
destruction is not a missile or a bomb but the rifle. In too many parts 
of the world it is easier

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and cheaper to buy a gun or a grenade than to buy a schoolbook or a 
life-saving drug. No country suffered more in Central America's civil 
wars than El Salvador. Today, no country suffers more from the weapons 
and gangs left over from the war than El Salvador. This assembly here 
can help to meet this challenge by expanding our extradition agreement 
and preventing criminals from escaping punishment by flight across 
borders.
    But America must also do our part to meet this threat to us all. We 
will continue to help you to train police forces that can fight gangs 
and gunrunners while respecting human rights. We have tightened our laws 
to prevent Americans from making arms deals abroad that would be illegal 
at home, beefed up controls on our southern border, and stepped up 
prosecution of smugglers. Together we helped to negotiate an OAS 
convention that criminalizes the unregulated manufacture and sale of 
firearms, mandates strong export controls, and requires all firearms to 
be marked so they can be traced from one end of our hemisphere to the 
other.
    I am determined to try to extend that convention to the entire world 
by the year 2000, and I hope I can count on your support for that 
endeavor. Now, if we can do these things, if we can create jobs, lift 
people out of poverty, protect our environment, build safer communities, 
we also will diminish the pressure that causes so many people in this 
hemisphere to leave their homes in search of a better life. Legal 
migration from Central America has enriched the United States greatly. 
It has made us a stronger, a more vital, a more enterprising, a more 
diverse society. But poverty and the yearning for a better future have 
also brought many illegal migrants to our Nation.
    As the President said, people do not leave their families and their 
homes and risk a dangerous journey for the uncertain prospects of life 
in a strange land willingly. Most illegal immigrants are not, by nature, 
lawbreakers. Most are simply looking for the chance to live in dignity 
and provide for their children. Nevertheless, we must continue to 
discourage illegal immigration, for it undermines the control of our 
borders, which every nation is entitled to pursue. And even more, it 
punishes hardworking people who play by the rules and who wait for their 
turn to come to the United States. Therefore, we must enforce our laws, 
but we will do so with justice and fairness. I believe fairness means 
treating people equitably, whatever their country of origin.
    Now, during the 1980's, many Central Americans fled oppression by 
both the right and the left. Some were hurt by soldiers, some harmed by 
rebels. All whose lives were shattered have a right to sympathy, safety, 
and justice. Many who have been in the United States for a long time 
have established deep roots in our communities. At my request, following 
the Central American summit in Costa Rica 2 years ago, our Congress 
passed legislation to help them. But it did so by establishing different 
treatment among groups of Central Americans, depending upon where they 
were from. I will do everything I possibly can to overcome that 
different treatment.
    And I will work with our Congress to write laws that are more 
evenhanded. Our treatment of people from Central America should reflect 
what they suffered, rather than who caused the suffering. This is wrong, 
and we should change it.
    Now, it is important for all of us to stop looking backward and 
start thinking forward about the future we want to build for our 
children. More than half the people of your nation today are under the 
age of 20. The same is true in Guatemala and Nicaragua and across 
Central America. These young people with no adult memories of war will 
not be defined by the need to take sides in a bitter struggle between 
two ideological extremes.
    Instead, they will come of age in the 21st century with the 
unquestioned right to choose their leaders and shape their destinies. 
Now they will use that right, I believe, to demand of their 
representatives better education, good jobs, fair justice, clean water, 
safe streets. They will want the things that will give them the tools to 
live their own dreams, that can help them to give value and meaning to 
their lives.
    I believe we have a solemn obligation to make democracy deliver for 
them so they will see a bright future, a future that is their future 
here in Central America. Juntos para un mejor futuro. Se lo debemos a 
los

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fallecidos; se lo debemos a nuestros hijos. We owe it to the fallen; we 
owe it to our children.
    Muchas gracias. Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:55 a.m. in the Legislative Assembly 
Hall. In his remarks, he referred to the President of the Legislative 
Assembly, Juan Duch; Supreme Court President Eduardo Tenorio; and 
President-elect Francisco Flores and President Armando Calderon Sol of 
El Salvador. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because 
the tape was incomplete.