MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bachelet sees poverty as the main threat to regional democracy

Pte. Michelle Bachelet

Chile's Michelle Bachelet who will be hosting the Ibero-American summit next week defended the legitimacy of Latinamerican governments, particularly Venezuela, and insisted that the prevailing consensus among leaders is that poverty represents the main threat for the region.

Bachelet said that governments with different "emphasis", such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Chile's can promote social cohesion with the same degree of success. "We can work with other governments that can have similarities with us on certain fields or differences in others. But I would say that what we share with Hugo Chavez, and other colleagues, above all is that we are democratically elected governments". The motive of the coming summit is "social cohesion" and "we've asked fellow leaders to come up with new ideas, effective ideas for people, not television announcements". Bachelet described social cohesion as a sound development "where majorities and minorities have access to social goods, public goods, so that we can build a harmonious overall development of the community, not one where some have too much and others have too little". "We're not after a consumers' society, we want a society of citizens with a good working market place, but this does not mean that the market has to decide how to guarantee the goods that reach each of us", she added. Bachelet underlined she was convinced that the "worst threat for our region is poverty, lack of opportunities, no democracy is sustainable in time without social cohesion, if it's not capable of integrating people, because democracy must deliver. Otherwise why should people believe that democracy is the best system? The idea to be addressed at the Ibero-American summit "is not a recipe of how to proceed, a photocopy, no country is photocopy of another country; we simply must agree on giving priority to issues and challenges we share". Finally Bachelet said she was looking forward to when in a few weeks time the region will have two women presidents, herself and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina. "We women can contribute something or our own to politics, in our countries and in relations between them, but evidently, each president defends her country". Bachelet said she knows Cristina very well, "I've known her as Senator, as First Lady and as a woman of politics we've always had a fluid and adequate communication so it should be very interesting".