Handout 2:   Excerpt from Oscar Arias' speech

Excerpt of Speech by Dr. Oscar Arias
National Civil Rights Museum--Public Forum (for school children)
Memphis, Tennessee
October 10, 2001

The Struggle for Peace and Justice

I want to tell you a story today, about the small country that I come from. How many of you know where Costa Rica is? It is a country about the size of the state of West Virginia, with a population of four million people, about as many as live in the city of Los Angeles. Costa Ricans, like you, call ourselves Americans, because we know that America includes North, Central and South, and that people living anywhere from Alaska to the tip of Argentina are Americans.

Costa Rica is in Central America, and most of you are probably too young to remember that during the 1980s, Central America was at war. There were civil wars going on in our neighbor countries of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and the countries that were not at war, which were Honduras and Costa Rica, were under great pressure to join in the fighting. When I became president of Costa Rica in 1986, the situation was very serious.

For the past fifty-three years, Costa Rica has not had any wars, for one major reason: we do not have an army. The Costa Rican army was abolished in 1948, so that our country could concentrate on building schools and hospitals instead of barracks and forts. We were a small country without a lot of resources, and our leaders knew that those resources would be much better spent on educating our children and keeping them healthy than on teaching them how to shoot, and training them for battle. So, for the past half-century, Costa Rica has been a country at peace.

The wars in Central America in the 1980s threatened to change our peaceful country into one that took sides in our neighbors' wars and provided support to the fighting forces. I knew that this was not what the majority of Costa Ricans wanted, and so I was determined to do something about it. I decided to sit down and write a plan for peace in the region.

The process of bringing peace to Central America was long and filled with obstacles, and I certainly did not do it alone. We had many meetings and visits with the presidents of all the Central American countries. We had to convince them, their armies, their people, and the press, that peace was better than war. This seems very logical, but there were many people, including the government of the United States under President Reagan, who wanted to see the wars continue until somebody won. What I kept trying to tell them is that wars do not have winners, only losers. Every day that war continues, more people lose their lives, people lose their sense of security and their freedom, and violence becomes more deeply rooted in people's hearts. None of this is victory; it is only a diminishing of the human soul.

In August of 1987, the five presidents of Central America signed my peace plan. But the process did not end there. That was really only the beginning. Each country needed to make its own peace and begin to comply with the requirements of the plan. They had to implement cease-fires, grant amnesties, appoint commissions to investigate human rights abuses, and hold free, democratic elections. It was not until 1996 that Guatemala signed its peace accords, putting a formal end to wars in Central America. We are still struggling to strengthen our democracies, to bring human rights abusers to justice, to bring some peace to the families that lost sons and daughters, uncles and fathers, brothers and sisters. Decades of war brought us only destruction and misery. We are now working to leave the past behind us and build our future in peace.

http://www.arias.or.cr/fundador/speeches/ncrmpf101001.htm      (excerpts)