Rice makes democracy call during Chile visit
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the world’s democracies must use the power of shared ideals “to accelerate democracy’s movement to ever more places across the globe”.
Rice spoke on Thursday night to a meeting of the Community of Democracies, one of a growing number of organisations worldwide that backs the spread of representative government.
She said people should look on tyranny the same way as they now look upon slavery: “a moral abomination that could not withstand the natural desire of every human being for a life of liberty and dignity”.
Rice spoke to a general session of the five-year-old group and planned to preside at a closed-door meeting of a democracy panel today before heading to El Salvador, the final stop of a four-nation Latin American tour.
On Thursday, a small group of demonstrators staged a protest against Rice in central Santiago.
They marched to a central plaza carrying a large sign reading “Condoleezza go home”. They burned a US flag.
Before arriving in Chile, Rice visited Brazil and Colombia. At each stop she has delivered a pro-democracy message.
In El Salvador, Rice was expected to celebrate what she regards a democratic success achieved after a bitter civil war fought during the 1980s. El Salvador also is the only country in the hemisphere with troops supporting the multi-national force in Iraq.
In her seven-minute speech in Santiago, Rice said it is the historic duty of democrats “to tell the world that tyranny is a crime of man, not a fact of nature”.
“Our goal must always be the elimination of tyranny in our world,” she said.
Rice also called for the creation of a “legitimate” UN rights body to replace the UN Human Rights Commission, based in Geneva.
On Wednesday, Zimbabwe was re-elected to a seat on that commission, drawing stinging rebukes from the US and other countries, which charged that the African nation is one of the world’s worst rights violators.
At a news conference on Thursday night with Chile’s president, Ricardo Lagos, Rice said the hemisphere “has no better example” than Chile of a government that is providing opportunities for its people.
Lagos, a Socialist and staunch opponent of Chile’s military dictatorship, is one of a number of left-of-centre leaders in South America. Rice has said the political tendencies of governments around the hemisphere are of little importance to the US so long as they respect democratic principles.
Lagos praised the “modern, mature” US-Chilean relationship and noted that two-way trade has grown sharply since a free trade agreement took effect.
During her travels, Rice repeatedly has been asked about the state of democratic principles in Venezuela under the leadership of the country’s anti-American, pro-Cuban president, Hugo Chavez.
She has made a point of playing down US concerns about Chavez, saying she wants to stress the administration’s “positive agenda” for the hemisphere. Rice’s visit to Chile coincided with a visit by Chavez to Cuba.
