Hon. Mr. Mauro Vieira, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of Brazil (left) and Ambassador Luiz Filipe de Macedo Soares, Secretary General of OPANAL (right)
On Monday, February 22, 2016, an Extraordinary Session of the Council of the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL) was held, on the occasion of the visit of His Excellency. Mr. Mauro Vieira, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of Brazil, to the OPANAL headquarters.
In his welcome speech, Ambassador Luiz Filipe de Macedo Soares, Secretary General of OPANAL, recalled that, since ratifying the Treaty of Tlatelolco, “Brazil had never stopped participating in the General Conferences of OPANAL” and that “it always complied and continues to fully comply with the Treaty obligations.”
Likewise, the Secretary General pointed out that during 2017 we will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Tlatelolco and OPANAL. In that sense, he recalled that in accordance with the decision of the XXIV Session of the General Conference of OPANAL (Resolution CG/Res.11/2015), the jubilee will be commemorated with the holding of a General Conference at the level of Foreign Ministers on February 14, 2017 and that Mexico will host the event.
For its part, the Hon. Mr. Mauro Vieira indicated that throughout those 50 years the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean remained faithful to the commitment to the use of nuclear energy exclusively for peaceful purposes. Likewise, he recalled that 2016 marks 25 years since the creation, by Brazil and Argentina, of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC), which represents “an example of our region's creative solutions in the pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons.”
The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of Brazil noted that “we resist the fallacy that still prevails in some sectors that nuclear weapons are essential to guarantee security among nations.” He declared that, as a region, “two years ago we affirmed our commitment to the so-called humanitarian pledge in order to rectify the absence of an international legal norm prohibiting nuclear weapons” and went on to indicate that “as the first denuclearized region in the world, we have “the moral authority to carry those lessons beyond the realm of nonproliferation to the field of nuclear disarmament.”
The Hon. Mr. Miguel Ruiz Cabañas Izquierdo, Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights of Mexico, pointed out that his country and Brazil are united by a common objective: “to end the paralysis of the disarmament forums that has been going on for several years, two decades at least.” ; force a multilateral dialogue in which all countries participate because we believe that the issue of nuclear disarmament is not only something that matters to the countries that possess nuclear weapons, quite the contrary, it is an issue that involves all of us, including, of course, and perhaps mainly to those of us who are not possessors of nuclear weapons.”
For his part, the Permanent Representative of Peru to OPANAL, His Excellency. Mr. Julio Garro Gálvez commented that “for the representatives before this Organization, the issue that occupies this organization is, as the Secretary General has said, a living issue, a topic on which we must continue to maintain our consultation.” Likewise, he pointed out that OPANAL “is not a temple to protect what we have already done in previous decades, which has been a lot and very important, but to maintain active coordination in what is coming in the future and what is still missing.”
The Extraordinary Session of the Council was chaired by the Hon. Mr. Enio Cordeiro, Ambassador of Brazil in Mexico, in his capacity as Pro-tempore President of the OPANAL Council. This session was attended by Ambassadors and Representatives of the following Member States of the Organization: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.