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A. If we don't reform our economies, we would just fall back in the trap. Whatever accords we reach ((with the lenders and international bodies)) would have to be conditioned on adjustments that we make in our own economic systems. We've got to be able to ensure that the resources generated from debt reduction and new financing are used according to very specific investment norms and according to economic procedures in line with our realities.
Q. You are a lifelong socialist. Yet now you are relying on market mechanisms, privatization, letting prices and interest rates find their own levels. It looks like an economic philosophy closer to Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's. What's socialist about it?
A. I know that the word socialism smells like the devil in the U.S., but it shouldn't be that way. The Communists expropriated the word socialism, so people now identify it with Marxism-Leninism.
What we're doing is not a contradiction of our ideology. Price controls were a consequence of the lack of markets, the lack of development and the existence of monopolies and oligopolies. These deficiencies required policies that should have been temporary but became permanent. Now we're correcting past errors. What is dramatic is that we're doing it all at once.
Q. The other two problems you stressed were drugs and the environment.
A. Drug trafficking has two facets: production and demand. If there were no demand, there would be no production. But production has many facets of its own, among them the poverty of our peasants in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia.
We have to find a substitute crop ((for coca)), and the economic and technical resources, as well as the political will, of the North must play a role. We must attack this crime without borders with a policy without borders. % Otherwise we will never be able to eliminate it.
As for the environment, Europe and the U.S. have caused great damage, but we ((in the Third World)) have also contributed. In Latin America we have the great Amazon region. The great depredator of the environment is misery and poverty. If we don't correct the problem in countries that still have great ecological resources, then humanity will see itself in the long term confronting a tragedy of survival.
Q. Venezuela has recently joined the Non-Aligned Movement. There's a view in Washington that the NAM is less relevant and coherent than in the past, that it has split up into regional and parochial groups. So you've joined a club just at the point when that club might be going out of business. How would you respond to that?
A. People in Washington should realize that the world is changing. Five years ago, who would have hoped for the extraordinary opening in East-West relations? I know that the Non-Aligned Movement, which represents some 120 nations, is often criticized, especially by industrialized countries, for its radical positions and for the way it acts in concert. But the fact remains that the Non-Aligned Movement has led to a new awareness among developing countries. The purpose is not conflict and confrontation, but dialogue.