World-Wide
Implications for Peru-Ecuador
Peace Agreement to be Finalized Next Week
By JONATHAN POWER
MADRID--The American columnist and
political philosopher Walter Lippmann once remarked that, in
politics, there can be no concluding chapter because there
is always more future out in front than recorded history
behind. At no point is there a pause when all problems,
upheavals and conflicts are solved and every good idea finds
its proper place.
In Asia, with the overthrow of Suharto
and the detonation of the Indian H-bomb we have just had
another jolting reminder of the truth of this observation.
At the same time, barely noticed, in Latin America there is
another event afoot that reaffirms the other side of
political life, the often successful quest for a more
ordered, self-disciplined and farsighted world, that
certainly India and Pakistan could benefit from in their own
fraught relationship over Kashmir and Indonesia likewise
with its continued occupation of East Timor.
Very soon one of the world's last
remaining inter-state conflicts, between Peru and Ecuador,
will be laid to rest with the signing of an historic peace
agreement.
For too many decades Latin America has
received more than its fair share of disapprobation because
of its declining relative economic standing after the high
hopes of the early years of the century when its growth was
spectacular, its penchant for dictatorship over democracy
and its leanings towards the worst income distribution of
the world's five continents.
Much of the critique was accurate -
and part remains opposite even now, despite widespread
economic reforms, when one observes the medieval attitude
towards the poorer classes and much of the continent
seemingly intent on iluting the benefits of its return to
democracy that marked the nineteen seventies and eighties
and the onset of a Latin renaissance. Today there seems to
be a vogue for an era of "democratic Caesars" - elected
politicians who ask their legislatures to re-write the
constitution so they can stand for a second or even a third
term, or for voting for president, as in Bolivia last year,
a former harsh military dictator or, as looks increasingly
likely in Venezuela, a colonel who all but carried out a
coup in 1992.
But there was always another side of
Latin America that put it in the forefront of civilization -
its belief in international law, the avoidance of war and
the supremacy of diplomacy and negociation. It has always
been a contradiction, too rarely perceived by outsiders,
that while Latin America may seem to have a life-long
fascination with the caudillo/general, its paucity of
international conflict makes it this century's most peaceful
continent, a state of being that is reflected not least in
the relatively low percentage of national income that Latin
America spends on military hardware. (Which makes it all the
more contemptible that the Clinton Administration, as a
favour to the U.S. arms industry, tried to stoke up Latin
American arms spending by reversing President Jimmy Carter's
ban on the sale of advanced warplanes to the
continent.)
The Latin American "gift" to the world
community of this notion of law before war was fashioned by
a distinctive group of scholars active in the years leading
up to World War 2, including Ricardo Alfaro of Panama,
Antonio de Bustamente of Cuba, Epitacio Pessoa of Brazil,
Francisco Urrutia of Colombia and most important, the
Chilean, Alejandro Alvarez. It was Alvarez who led the
effort to show how the basis of international law as it
developed after World War 1 was fundamentally wrong, with
its stress on the independence of states. His emphasis was
on the "interdependence of states". "This is", he wrote,
"the foundation of their reciprocal relations, and mutual
assistance is the condition for their peaceful co-existence
and their mutual and moral development".
Although World War 2 appeared to
suffocate this thinking it did in fact survive to play an
important part in the post war order, not just in the
proclamations of international law societies but in the way
that states went about formulating their ideas of their own
relations and the rules that ought to govern
them.
This week's historic peace agreement
points up the relevance of these political ideas. Ecuador
and Peru have been arguing about a piece of (oil-rich)
Amazon forest since Spanish colonial times - which puts
India's and Pakistan's quarrel or Indonesia's and East
Timor's or, come to that, Israel's and the Palestinians'into
some perspective. In 1995 the two countries briefly went to
war which animated Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the U.S.,
working together, to broker a series of peace
negociations.
Ecuador has now given up its claim,
but Peru, embracing Alvarez's principles, will give Ecuador
permanent access to the Amazon - a permeable border in
effect.
Latin America now wants to make money,
not war. If Asia and Africa, not to speak of Greece, Turkey
and ex-Yugoslavia in Europe, could learn from Latin America
about the superiority of law over war not only would there
be more peace, there'd be more prosperity - and the world
will have taken a great step away from Lippman's
sophisticated pessimism towards Alvarez's more considered
optimism..
May 27,
1998, MADRID
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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