[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 42, Number 49 (Monday, December 11, 2006)]
[Pages 2127-2128]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks Following Discussions With President Oscar Arias Sanchez of 
Costa Rica

December 6, 2006

    President Bush. Mr. President, welcome. I'm glad to welcome you back 
to the White House. I appreciate the very important discussions we had. 
Our discussions started with the bilateral relationship between the 
United States and Costa Rica. It is an important relationship. It's an 
important relationship when it comes to trade; it's an important 
relationship when it comes to interchanges between our governments and 
our peoples.
    Mr. President, you spent a lot of time talking about the importance 
of education, and I respect you for that, and I appreciate your emphasis 
on education. And we will investigate ways to determine whether or not 
the United States can help, if you so desire, on matters of education. 
And I congratulate you on being very successful in educating the younger 
children of your country. And I, again, admire your focus on extending 
the education through all grades in Costa Rica.
    Secondly, we spent time on CAFTA. It's an important initiative for 
this administration. I appreciate your dedication to the issue of trade. 
The President understands full well that trade is the best way to help 
reduce poverty around the world, and so he made it clear to me his deep 
desire for the United States to take the lead on the Doha round of the 
trade discussions, which I assured him we would.
    I appreciated very much your advice, Mr. President, on the 
neighborhood in which we live. I thank you for your clear vision when it 
comes to forms of government. And I appreciate you sharing with me your 
insights as to the different countries and different leaders and how 
best that we can work together to achieve peace and stability.
    It's an honor to have you here, sir. You represent a fine country 
that a lot of Americans have had firsthand knowledge with. And I'm proud 
to welcome you.
    President Arias Sanchez. Well, thank you, Mr. President, for your 
time. This room is familiar to me. I visited the Oval Office in the 
past, during the Reagan years and when President Bush was President. I 
was telling President Bush that in the past, every time I came to the 
White House, it was not to talk about Costa Rica, but about Nicaragua, 
and I'm very happy that we had a chance to talk about Costa Rica this 
time.
    And as he just mentioned, my country is a small country--we produce 
what we do not consume, and we consume what we do not produce. This is 
why trade is so important to us. Costa Rica is a very open economy, is 
the second-largest open economy in this hemisphere, after Chile. And 
this is why CAFTA is important to us and this is why we're so determined 
to approve CAFTA, ratify CAFTA in our Congress as soon as possible. And 
we are in the process of initiating negotiations with the European Union 
about free trade agreement with the whole of Europe, the European Union.
    Concerning education, this is my priority. Peace was my priority 20 
years ago; now it's education. I was asking President Bush that his 
program, No Child Left Behind, could be applied in many Latin American 
countries. You are all aware that what explains our failures, among 
other things, is the fact that average schooling in Latin American 
countries is only 6\1/2\ years, and that explains the social inequality 
and the poverty of our people.
    So at the beginning of the 21st century, we're going to spend more 
on education, which is my dream and my determination to spend as much as 
8 percent of GDP on education. We are simply condemning our children to 
remain poor as their grandfathers--and this is something that certainly 
the people of Latin America don't deserve.

[[Page 2128]]

    President Bush. Thank you, sir. Glad you're here. Good job.

Note: The President spoke at 11:41 a.m. in the Oval Office at the White 
House. The Office of the Press Secretary also released a Spanish 
language transcript of these remarks.