U.S.-Latin America relationships crucial to the world's future

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

Last week, I went to Panama, and this week, I am accompanying Bill on his state visits to Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. Since I firmly believe relationships between the United States and Latin America are critical to the entire hemisphere's future peace, I wish every American could be on these trips with us.

Then, Americans could see for themselves how what happens thousands of miles south of our border affects our lives at home. Venezuela, for example, is our biggest supplier of oil -- and home to some of the best players in major league baseball. Brazil, with more than 160 million people, is a multiracial democracy struggling with some of the same problems we face. Argentina has joined with us in U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world -- from Haiti to Bosnia.

And Panamanians and Americans are working to define our partnership after the Panama Canal reverts to Panama on Dec. 31, 1999. The United States is the principal beneficiary of the goods that travel through the canal, which allows ships to cross between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans without sailing around the tip of South America. In fact, at the Miraflores Locks, canal officials permitted me to open a set of locks for a 33,000-ton South Korean container ship on its way from Savannah to Long Beach, California.

Over a century ago, building the canal was essential to improving opportunities for people all over the Americas. As daunting as that task was, we face what may be an even harder challenge today. Instead of mountains, we seek to move hearts, to change old attitudes, to banish hunger and disease, to educate all our children and to empower the women of our hemisphere to participate fully in the life of our nations.

Empowering women to make the most of their God-given promise was one of the main themes of the Seventh Annual Conference of Spouses of Heads of State and Governments of the Americas I attended in Panama City. Each year since the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, we have tried to shine a spotlight on -- and take action to address -- some of the most important issues facing women and children in our hemisphere: primary education, eradicating measles, maternal mortality, family planning and women's political participation.

A few year ago, Faustina Nunez and her friends acted on their dream to make the most of their abilities. They started a business growing plants and seedlings to sell in the cities of Panama and to the government's reforestation programs. Their neighbors laughed at the idea. "They said that our nursery was going to fail, that this was something the men did, not women," she told me and Panama's First Lady, Dora Perez-Ballardares, when we visited the five-acre nursery in Chica, a small hilltop village at the edge of the tropical forest.

But Faustina and her partners, who called themselves the Association for Gender, Nature and Progress, were not discouraged. Within two years, the women had sold enough orchids, medicinal plants and seedlings to expand their business. They had provided seedlings to reclaim 48 acres of the deforested Altos de Campana National Park. And most importantly for them, where before they had worked for free on their husbands' vegetable farms, they were now able to contribute to the family finances, to bring in extra income to buy books and school clothes for their children.

"We grew and grew, and our community was able to see that we were playing an important role," Faustina said. "We were a society of strong-willed women, and we were not going to step back."

Part of the work Faustina and her partners are accomplishing is helping reforest the land around the grand Panama Canal. When I flew over the canal in a U.S. Army helicopter, I saw one of the world's engineering marvels and a tribute both to technological innovation and human fortitude. But I also saw some of the damage man has caused to Panama's rich tropical forest in the canal watershed.

Acres of thick, green forest tapered off into barren land dotted by tall yellow grasses, naked trees and fields abandoned by poor farmers who had moved on to clear more land. Over the past 40 years, slash-and-burn agriculture has reduced Panama's forests by half, causing soil erosion and depleting much of the fresh water supply the canal depends on to function smoothly.

Faustina, her partners and other women are part of a joint effort by Panama and the United States to turn this situation around. Our cooperation isn't limited to this. Americans and Panamanians are also working on a multinational counter-narcotics center that would monitor, track and stop drugs coming north. Just as men of imagination, talent and perseverance sought to connect the oceans in an earlier time, today, men and women of goodwill and vision are working together, within and across borders, to solve today's problems.

-- Creators Syndicate