http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/081/nation/Aid_for_poor_urged_as_a_tool_to_fight_terror+.shtml
Aid for Poor Urged as a Tool to Fight Terror
By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent
3/22/2002
MONTERREY, Mexico - World leaders from Peru to the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau seized on US security concerns yesterday to plead for more aid at a United Nations development conference, arguing that eradicating poverty is the best way to prevent terrorism.
''To talk of development is also to talk of a firm and resolute struggle against terrorism,'' said the Peruvian president, Alejandro Toledo, whose own country was the site of a car bomb explosion Wednesday night outside the US Embassy in Lima that killed at least nine people. President Bush is due to visit the South American capital tomorrow after stopping here to join nearly 60 other world leaders at the UN Conference on Development in this industrial city.
By choosing Peru as the site of his first South American visit, Bush was seen to be recognizing the country's success in rooting out the Shining Path guerrilla movement that terrorized the country through most of the 1990s. No group claimed responsibility for the car bombing. And Bush said yesterday that he would not alter his Latin American tour, which ends in El Salvador on Sunday.
Bush arrived in Mexico yesterday, several hours after his hemispheric archrival, President Fidel Castro of Cuba, left the summit citing an unspecified ''special situation.''
The weeklong gathering, which ends today, has set out the ambitious goal of cutting the number of people living in extreme poverty in half by 2015, a goal delegates said would require twice the current $50 billion in annual international aid. As of yesterday, only the United States and Europe have pledged an additional $12 billion.
World leaders urged industrialized nations to spend more in the interest of national security, if not out of philanthropic motivations.
''It's not just a moral concern that brings us together. ... We are also here to eradicate terrorism, which is an international scourge,'' said President Jose Maria Aznar of Spain. He spoke shortly after gunmen shot dead a Socialist Party politician in the northern Basque region of Spain in an act attributed to Basque separatists of the ETA.
Even leaders of relatively peaceful nations played the terrorism card to urge greater foreign aid.
''Our people have an inalienable right to climb out of poverty, poverty that breeds terrorism,'' said Tommy Remengesau Jr., president of Palau. The federation of volcanic islands in the western Pacific Ocean was under US defense protection until 1996, when it became a sovereign nation.
Other leaders objected to the strings attached to the increased financial aid, including requirements that recipient countries speed free-market reforms and clean up corruption.
''The consensus draft which the masters of the world are imposing on this conference intends that we accept humiliating conditions and intrusive alms,'' Castro told delegates in a speech loaded with characteristically strong rhetoric.
The Cuban president also blamed wealthy nations for creating the conditions in which 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, defined as living on $1 a day.
''The poor countries cannot be blamed for this tragedy. They neither conquered nor plundered entire continents for centuries ... and modern poverty is not of their making,'' he added.
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