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It's true that recently there has been a lack of coherence in the developing world. That has been one of the most worrying factors of the 1980s. This has been a perverse decade, a profound crisis for all of our countries. Economic problems are more serious than they've ever been. The poverty of our countries consists not just of groups of people in misery, which is still the case in the developed countries. For us, poverty is taking on structural characteristics that really threaten the future of humanity. We are all feeling this, and it's driving us toward convergence. The Non-Aligned Movement is part of that convergence.
Q. What do you mean by convergence?
A. I mean a consensus among all the countries in the world on the essential problems from which the developing countries are suffering. In general, that the political struggle ((between North and South)) has been de-ideologized.
I wouldn't say that I put all my hope in the Non-Aligned Movement. Absolutely not. But it's an organization that could serve the right objectives, and it could increase our power of negotiation if we know how to use it. No doubt the problems of Latin America are different from those of Africa or Asia. But there is a common denominator, and it's our shared need to exert pressure on the developing world in a determined way.
Q. When you talk about common denominators and exerting pressure on the industrialized North, are you advocating a debtors' cartel?
A. No. Such a thing would be an act of suicide -- and of collective suicide. Theoretically, we might have the power to provoke a great worldwide financial crisis that would be a catastrophe for the industrialized countries. But we would also suffer. So this would be like the biblical story of Samson pulling the temple down on his head.
Q. Countries like Venezuela, when they got into economic trouble in the past, used to be able to say to the U.S. "Watch out or we may go Communist. Help us." Isn't that now changing?
A. The ghost of Communism has done much damage to relations between the U.S. and Latin America. Under the pretext of defending the region from Communism, the U.S. supported military dictatorships. This was a terrible error. Now we don't need to look for ghosts. We have realities. If the problems that our countries face are not resolved, the social explosions would be of a magnitude previously unimagined. I'm not just imagining this. The world today is much more complex. Before the days of mass media, radio and television, the poor were more resigned to their fate. Without television, they didn't have any possibility for comparison. That's why today's poverty is more dangerous and could provoke terrible social upheavals -- a Latin America in effervescent rebellion. We are facing certain danger. If we don't deal with this catastrophe, military dictatorships could come back.
Q. What is the ghost we have to be frightened of today?
A. The immense gap that is opening up because poverty is now intolerable. And the poor man now knows how poor he is. He has his transistor radio. That's not a ghost but reality.
Q. Did the price riots that flared up last February here in Caracas and left 300 dead provide a glimmer of that danger?