Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

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.