Dr. Jennifer McCoy, director of the Carter Center's Americas Program, is traveling with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as a member of the Carter Center delegation to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil from April 27 to May 4, 2009. Read more about the trip and read her blog entries below.
May 3-4, 2009 - Sao Paolo and Brasilia, Brazil
Carter Center delegation days 7-8
We flew over Sao Paolo, one of the largest cities in the world with nearly 20 million people, and were astounded at the breadth of the skyscrapers across the landscape. It looked almost like a science fiction scene. We only had a few hours stop on the way to Brasilia, but we made the most of it. We stopped at an artisan market next to a small piece of the rainforest in a beautiful park. Then we drove to the governor's palace where we were hosted by Governor of Sao Paolo José Serra, his wife Monica, and former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso for a wonderful lunch, followed by a presentation of the highest honor of the State of Sao Paolo. Governor Serra gave a personal speech about his own exile and the impact of President Carter's human rights policy in ridding Brazil of the military dictatorship.
Governor Jose Serra presents the State of Sao Paolo's highest honor to President Carter for his human rights efforts in Latin America.
Indeed, throughout our stay in Brazil, individuals came up to the Carters to tell them how their human rights policy, and Rosalynn Carter's early trip to Brazil in 1977, had saved their own lives and given them hope for change. We met with a group of business leaders to learn about how Brazil was facing the financial crisis, and many of them had also spent the '70s in the United States during the military dictatorship and witnessed President Carter's election. They told us that the Brazilian economy was sound, and even though growth was expected to be flat in 2009, they expected the economy to pick back up by the end of the year.
Jennifer McCoy with Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
We flew to Brasilia, a planned city built from scratch in the 1950s to bring development to Brazil's interior. The architecture is amazing and beautiful. We met with President Lula, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, and Special Advisor to the President on Foreign Policy Marco Aurélio Garcia, discussing Brazil's growing role in global politics, Latin American politics, the Middle East, and the new Obama administration. In the evening, the U.S. ambassador hosted a dinner with some of Brazil's leaders in biofuels, food security, energy, and foreign affairs, including former President José Sarney. We learned of the prospects for Brazil's new offshore oil discoveries which could make it the second largest oil producer in the world and the history of its extremely successful ethanol program dating to the 1970s at the same time that the Carter administration instituted conservation policies and cut U.S. oil imports in half. While the United States failed to keep those energy policies, Brazil has moved to 55 percent sugar-ethanol use, with 90 percent of new cars using flex-fuels. As a result, Brazil has saved 365 million tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of saving 112 million trees. Brazil and the United States are jointly developing biofuel capacity in Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Overall, it was extremely exciting to see the advances in Brazil from many perspectives, particularly its significant role in climate change and biofuels, and its growing political engagement and leadership by example both in the region and in its focus on South-South cooperation.
Sao Paulo, Brazil
May 4, 2009 - Brazil
An update on river blindness in the Americas
In Brazil, the Center's delegation got an update on a health program that The Carter Center implements jointly with the Brazilian Ministry of Health. We hope that the transmission of river blindness will be successfully interrupted in the Americas by 2012.
Yanomami child taking Mectizan® treatment, which can safely treat and prevent river blindness.
In the Americas, more than 500,000 people are at risk for onchocerciasis, or river blindness. The Carter Center's Onchocerciasis Elimination Program for the Americas works alongside national programs and partners like the Lions Clubs International Foundation to eliminate river blindness in the region through health education and semiannual mass distribution of Mectizan® tablets, donated by Merck & Co., Inc. In Brazil, river blindness affects approximately 11,000 Brazilians in 17 communities, mostly impacting the Yanomami people, like the young boy pictured taking Mectizan, above. Together with the six endemic countries, the Carter Center-led river blindness campaign pushes to interrupt transmission of the disease by 2012. To date six of the 13 endemic areas in Latin America have achieved this goal. Learn more about the Center's river blindness work.
May 4, 2009 - Highlights from the Right of Access to Information Conference in Lima, Peru
By guest blogger Laura Neuman, associate director of the Carter Center's Americas Program and the access to information project manager.
The Americas Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information held in Lima, Peru, ended on Thursday, April 30, with final plenary sessions considering the conference Findings and Plan of Action. The conference, held under the auspices of The Carter Center in collaboration with the Organization of American States, the Andean Juridical Committee, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, was a follow-up to the International Conference on Public Information held last year at the Center in Atlanta. The goal of the Americas Regional conference was to contextualize the findings from the global conference and to advance the right of access to information in the region. Unfortunately, the swine flu outbreak meant that a number of our colleagues from Mexico were not able to come. Nevertheless, we had five leaders from Mexico join our other 110 participants from18 countries in the Americas representing governments, civil society organizations, regional and international bodies and financial institutions, donor agencies and foundations, the private sector, media, and scholars.
Attendees of the right of access to information conference.
Beginning Tuesday April 28, conference attendees were invited to attend a World Bank consultation on their draft disclosure policy. Close to 50 of our participants attended and provided important inputs, which will be shared with World Bank officials in Washington, including President Zoellick. That afternoon, we held the first plenary sessions with an opening by Santiago Canton, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Carlos Felipe Jaramillo, World Bank director for Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. I also provided some brief comments. Peruvian Prime Minister Yehude Simon spoke a bit later than expected, as he had been delayed by more than 15,000 women marching against a new government policy to reduce free milk rations. His office occupied by the leaders of the march, he found himself a bit detained - but came later and spoke eloquently and forcefully regarding the critical value of information. The rest of Tuesday was comprised of panels on the impact of transparency, whether transparency and the right of access to information is a "luxury" in the face of regional crises, and four illuminating case studies.
Throughout Wednesday, April 29, experts and regional leaders spent the day in small working groups exploring the incentives and costs for passing, implementing, and enforcing an access to information law; the necessary environment - such as an independent judiciary, strong institutions, and capacitated media - for the right to information to thrive; how to extend the notion of transparency to the development banks such as the World Bank and to the private sector; strategies for increasing the demand for the right to information; and whether the Americas needs a regional treaty. The conclusions of these working groups served as the basis for the conference findings and plan of action. That evening we were joined by President and Mrs. Carter and Jennifer McCoy at our official conference dinner at the famous Hucca Pucllana.
On Thursday, April 30, we returned to meet as a group for report backs from the working groups and, under President Carter's leadership, to debate the draft conference findings and plan of action. In the afternoon, we heard from the Organization of American States Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Catalina Botero and Vice-President of the Inter-American Court for Human Rights Diego Garcia-Sayan.
Laura Neuman with President Carter at the right of access to information conference.
At the conclusion of the conference, participants reiterated that the right of access to information is a fundamental human right and necessary to fight corruption, improve development and good governance, and to exercise other essential rights. The conference further found that secrecy has been a major contributing factor to crises - security, financial, environmental - in our region and that the major challenges facing the Americas are a lack of implementation and enforcement, backsliding in the right of access to information, and an absence of widespread demand. Participants will be submitting additional comments for the draft documents, with the final version of the Americas Regional Findings and Plan of Action completed and issued in the coming two weeks.
Late Thursday night, most of the conference participants left for the airport – only to find themselves still in Lima many hours later. Fog had closed the airport, leaving many of our colleagues sleeping on the airport floor. By Saturday, most had overcome the delays and made it home to catch-up on missed sleep and to consider the next steps to advancing the right of access to information in the Americas.
May 2, 2009 – La Paz and Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Carter Center delegation day 6
On our second day in Bolivia, we received a surprise in learning shortly before our scheduled meeting that the president of the National Electoral Court had resigned. Bolivia is scheduled to have presidential and assembly elections on Dec. 6 of this year to comply with the new constitution (approved Jan. 25, 2009). Getting to these elections has been difficult as negotiations were required within the Congress to pass the law authorizing the elections and a breakdown in the talks led to a hunger strike by President Morales for several days. A compromise was reached that included an ambitious plan to provide a completely new voter's registration list based on newly-collected biometric data of all eligible voters – ten fingerprints and a photo collected in a national digital database. Even with international assistance, the feasibility of reregistering the three million voters, acquiring the technology to do it, and producing the new lists for political parties to check them against other national registration lists in time for the December elections was strongly debated within the National Electoral Council and remains a matter of debate.
The government immediately replaced the president of the Electoral Court with a woman who had served previously on the Court prior to the Morales administration (from about 2001-2005) and is well-respected for her knowledge and professionalism. We hope that this appointment will help to solidify confidence in the Electoral Court and the electoral process during this crucial year for Bolivia.
On Saturday morning, we had a warm and productive meeting with President Morales at the Presidential Palace during which we discussed the need to improve U.S. relations and move towards the exchange of U.S. ambassadors once again, following the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador (along with the DEA and part of AID) from Bolivia last fall. In addition, President Carter asked President Morales to reiterate his welcome to the Peace Corps to return its volunteers to Bolivia. The Peace Corps had withdrawn the volunteers last fall after some public comments that volunteers might be involved in intelligence activities for the U.S. government (or that volunteers may be asked to provide information to the U.S. government) led the Peace Corps to be concerned about the safety of its volunteers in Bolivia. President Carter's mother (at age 70!) and grandson were Peace Corps volunteers and he felt very strongly about the importance of their return. President Morales did publicly welcome back the Peace Corps after our meeting.
President Carter with Bolivian President Evo Morales.
We also discussed with President Morales the upcoming elections, in which he expressed his desire that The Carter Center serve as election observers, along with the European Union, the OAS, and others. Another issue that came up in both Ecuador and Bolivia was strong tension between the private media and the government. In Bolivia, media directors told us of their concern about not receiving access to government press conferences in La Paz and about disparaging remarks by the President about individual journalists and media outlets that can put them in danger from overzealous government supporters. The President, on the other hand, spoke of his concern about distorted news reporting and the political role of private media linked to political opposition groups. Media relations in polarized societies is an issue we have dealt with before, particularly in Venezuela, and we have seen how these tensions can contribute to conflict and deepen polarization in harmful ways.
Before leaving La Paz, we visited a well-known women's group in El Alto - the Bartolina Sisa - to get a sense of how one social movement was promoting its rights. The women spoke eloquently of past gender and racial discrimination and how they had fought to include greater equality in the new constitution, including quotas on the candidate lists for women in the National Assembly elections.
President Carter meets with an indigenous women's movement in Bolivia.
Departing La Paz Saturday afternoon, we flew to Santa Cruz to meet the prefects (governors) of the departments who have been in the opposition to the Morales administration and which also voted for autonomy last year. The prefects expressed their disagreements with aspects of the constitution and the process by which it was drafted, but they did not question the legitimacy of the president as the elected national leader, and they planned to participate in the upcoming national elections mandated by the new constitution. They expressed concerns about the weak institutions in the country – the fact that the Constitutional Court has not functioned for several years, among other things; certain aspects of the electoral process – the voter's list and the impartiality of the National Electoral Court; and the judicial harassment of opposition leaders, including a number of judicial suits against each of them. They acknowledged the demand for change in the country, but opposed the manner with which it was being carried out, which they described as imposed by the governing party and the president in an authoritarian style rather than one of negotiation and consensus-building.
Overall, the visit highlighted the important changes occurring in the country in response to a strong demand for such change, but also the deep polarization within the country – geographic, cultural, and social.
Friday, May 1, 2009 - La Paz, Bolivia
Carter Center delegation days 2-5
We have been on a whirlwind tour in the last three days traveling from Quito to Lima to La Paz. On our last day in Quito, President Carter gave a speech to a full house at FLACSO, followed by an excellent meeting and lunch with President Correa and several of his cabinet members. We discussed with them foreign policy issues -- the recent Summit of the Americas, Ecuador-U.S. relations and prospects, and the current status of relations with Colombia. President Correa has met with our Ecuador-Colombia Binational Dialogue Group of citizens and expressed appreciation of their work and our support to them in improving mutual understanding between Colombia and Ecuador. We also talked about domestic issues that will be facing the country, including the impacts of the financial crisis and fall in oil prices, the continued implementation of the new constitution as the country moves to establish the permanent institutions, and some tensions between the government and media (following another meeting we had had with some public and private media directors and editors).
The Carters are greeted at the Presidential Palace in Ecuador.
Carter Center CEO Dr. John Hardman with Ecuador President Rafael Correa.
We then left Quito to fly to Lima, Peru, to join our ongoing Regional Conference on the Right to Access to Information, which gathered more than 100 people from 18 countries of the hemisphere – specialists, government ministers, journalists, NGOS, and international organizations working on the issue. The group spent 2.5 days intensively writing a Plan of Action for the Americas to compliment the Atlanta Declaration that had been produced at an international conference at The Carter Center in Atlanta in February 2008.
In Lima, President Carter was also awarded the Ombudsman's Human Rights Prize in a lovely ceremony at the National Library. Finally, we had a productive meeting with President Garcia discussing Andean relations and Peru's situation. Peru is one of the few Latin American countries that appears likely to achieve a positive economic growth rate this year.
President Carter received the Ombudsman's Human Rights Prize in Peru.
From Peru, we flew to La Paz, Bolivia, and had to acclimate to even higher altitudes than Quito (which was already 9,000 feet). The airport for La Paz is 13,000 feet and the city itself 12,000. We passed over Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia – the deepest and highest lake in the world, I am told. We will have two days in Bolivia, which is celebrating May Day today with marches and festivities. Nevertheless, several government officials and others have been gracious enough to come to meet with us in our hotel on a holiday. We met the foreign minister this meeting, who commented positively on the meetings with President Obama and Secretary Clinton in Trinidad and we met with the official Land Reform Institute with whom The Carter Center has had a cooperation agreement to train their top officials in conflict management techniques to assist in their implementation of a 2005 land reform law requiring the retitling of all land in Bolivia, and the subsequent distribution of those lands determined to revert to the state if found unproductive or without legal title. The redistributed land is to go to indigenous peasants who had not benefitted from the previous land reforms dating back to the Revolution of 1952.
El Alto, Bolivia
Tonight President Carter will make a speech to a large group of people who have been involved with us in forming a Community of Practice on Dialogue and Deliberation. Increasing the capacity for constructive dialogue to search for consensus and creative problem-solving is an essential task for Bolivia as it moves forward in its social transformation to end racial discrimination, bring more equality and participation to indigenous groups, and implement an ambitious new constitution. Competing concepts of control and distribution of revenues from natural resources have been dividing the country for several years.
Tomorrow we will see President Morales, as well as some social movements in La Paz, before traveling to Santa Cruz to meet with the prefects (governors) of the so-called "media luna" states in the eastern half of the country, who have been the core of the political opposition to the Morales government.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 - Quito, Ecuador
Transcript of President Carter's remarks at FLACSO University in Ecuador
President Carter gave remarks at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales - Latin American Social Sciences University) in Quito, Ecuador, this morning. His speech focused on challenges facing Ecuador in the 21st century and was followed by a Q&A session with the audience. You can read his speech here.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - Quito, Ecuador
Carter Center delegation day 1 – Quito, Ecuador
We arrived last night, the day following Ecuador's national elections to choose new authorities under the new constitution approved last September. President, National Assembly, Prefects (governors), and mayors were chosen, though we are still waiting for the results of the National Assembly races. As pre-election polls had predicted, President Correa won with 51 percent of the vote. The question now is whether his party will win a simple majority in the new unicameral legislature or whether he will need to make an alliance with a smaller party to achieve that alliance.
The re-elected government faces some real challenges in light of the financial crisis, given both the decline of oil prices (one of their major exports) and the dollarization of their economy. Since they actually use the U.S. dollar for their national currency, they cannot print more money or devalue their currency to help their exports and curb their rising imports. For that reason, the government has temporarily imposed higher tariffs on foreign imports, causing some concern among its neighbors (who have devalued their currencies, making their own exports cheaper).
The new Congress will also have some major tasks to write the necessary laws to implement the new Constitution. The country has been operating with temporary authorities since the Constitution was approved, including an interim Congress and interim election authorities. We met with a group that is implementing an unprecedented new initiative mandated by the constitution – to create a fourth branch of government providing citizens more direct oversight and accountability over the government. This entity will be called branch of Transparency and Social Control, and a Citizen's Participation Council will play a key role in monitoring government officials and recommending investigation of any suspected corruption cases to appropriate national authorities (which citizens will also participate in choosing). We met with the interim Citizen's Council, whom we have been providing some expert advice and whose own selection process we monitored and made recommendations for improvement for the selection of the permanent body.
We met with the Foreign Minister (photo below) this morning and talked about U.S.-Ecuadoran relations, among other issues. Despite a recent disagreement over nominations of personnel to special international-linked security units, relations between the two countries are generally positive and the two governments had congenial encounters at the recent Summit of the Americas.
The Carters meet with Ecuador Foreign Minister Fander Falconi (at left).
We also talked with the Foreign Minister and the Binational Dialogue Group about relations with Colombia, with whom Ecuador broke relations more than a year ago following a Colombian incursion into Ecuadoran territory pursuing the FARC. The Carter Center formed the dialogue group one and a half years ago with ten distinguished citizens from each country to improve mutual understanding of the problems and constraints at the border area stemming from externalities of Colombia's war against drugs and guerrillas. One of the most striking results is the 600,000 Colombians now living in Ecuador (with a much smaller population than Colombia), and perhaps 150,000 of these immigrants would qualify for refugee status. The countries are working with the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees to process more of these potential refugees (currently less than 25,000 have been officially designated refugees) and seek financial support to provide needed services them.
The Dialogue Group talked about the significant change in perceptions and understanding they personally had undergone, after five two-day dialogue meetings facilitated by The Carter Center (in partnership with UNDP and Corporación Andina de Fomento ). The members are also trying to help get accurate information to each society, where suspicions and misperceptions abound, by writing many news editorials and op/eds, and organizing academic forums and policy forums involving citizens and leaders from the border areas.
Socorro Ramírez, Colombian member of the Dialogue Group, holds a silver plate to be presented as a gift to President Carter by the members of the group. She read the plate's inscription, including the list of Ecuadorian group members . To her right is Ricardo Estrada, Ecuadorian member of the Dialogue Group, who then read the list of Colombian group members.
After a visit to the interim Congress, we had a walking tour of Old Town Quito at night, which is quite beautiful (see photos below). This is the location of the presidential palace, the city hall, and two beautiful cathedrals, with construction of the plaza dating back to the 16th century.
On Wednesday, President Carter will give a public address at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales - Latin American Social Sciences University), and we will meet with the President before departing the country for Peru, where our Regional Americas Conference on the Right to Access to Information is already in full swing.
The Carters walk through Old Town Quito with Jennifer McCoy. Behind them is Carter Center
CEO Dr. John Hardman.
Walking through Old Town Quito: Francisco Diez (Carter Center Representative in Latin
America), Cecile Mouly (Carter Center program coordinator in Ecuador), and the Carters.
COMMENTS:
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 8:24 P.M.
Thanks for the updates ASAP. Great photos. I forwarded the Ecuador speech to Daniel and Dr. Mike MacQuaide at Oxford campus. The Carters, Dr. H., MM, all look well, Jennifer too young to be Emeritus!
– Rita Thompson
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Watch President Carter's live remarks from Ecuador on April 29 (Video no longer available)
Watch President Carter's remarks by live webcast from FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales - Latin American Social Sciences University) in Quito, Ecuador, beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (10 a.m. in Quito). His speech will focus on challenges facing Ecuador in the 21st century and will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Friday, April 24, 2009
President and Mrs. Carter and I, along with Carter Center CEO John Hardman, will leave on Monday, April 27, for a four-country visit to Latin America. We'll visit Carter Center projects in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil, and attend our regional conference on the Right to Access to Information in Lima. In the wake of the recent Summit of the Americas, this is an exciting time to be visiting Latin America.
I saw the overwhelmingly positive reception of President Barack Obama by Caribbean and Latin leaders last week in Trinidad and Tobago. President Obama's message of a renewal of U.S. relations with the region was quite welcome. Even with President Ortega reminding us (and berating the United States) of the historical legacies of more than a century of U.S. intervention in his country and others, President Obama responded quite rightly that all of our countries need to acknowledge our mistakes and responsibility for problems in the past, but it is also time to look to the future and see how we can work together to address the urgent problems facing us, including the financial crisis and global warming.
Signals of a changing relationship have begun. Obama's "listening mode" was appropriate, and he received an earful from the Caribbean and Latin leaders about the anachronistic Cuban policy of the United States. The United States had just announced a welcome lifting of restrictions on Cuban-Americans rights to travel and send remittances to their families in Cuba. But the rest of Americans would also like to have the right to travel to Cuba, which is currently one of the only, if not the only, countries we are restricted by our own government from traveling to.
Hugo Chávez got on the bandwagon of a renewed relationship by suggesting he was ready to exchange ambassadors again with Washington, after having expelled the U.S. ambassador last fall in solidarity with Bolivia's expulsion of the U.S. ambassador. Even though the serious differences between the United States and countries like Venezuela and Bolivia remain, the exchange of ambassadors is a crucial first step to restore the communication needed to resolve disputes and address common interests.
President Carter will undoubtedly be asked about U.S. relations during his trip, but we are traveling as private citizens and do not represent the U.S. government. We will visit our programs and explore whether we can be helpful in the future as Ecuador and Bolivia in particular engage in democratic transformations involving new constitutions, new institutions, and new ways of doing politics. In Ecuador, poorly functioning political institutions contributed to a decade of instability in which Ecuador had seven presidents in ten years. After independent candidate Rafael Correa was elected on a mandate of revamping the national institutions through a constitutional reform, The Carter Center was invited to monitor the elections for the Constituent Assembly. We monitored not only those elections, but also the constitutional drafting process and the referendum to approve the new constitution, reporting to Ecuadorans and the international community on the process. Currently we are providing assistance as the Ecuadorans develop an innovative fourth branch of state, called Transparency and Social Control, to allow citizens to participate in nominating important government authorities (such as the Comptroller General and Ombudsman) and in providing oversight of government functions and anti-corruption efforts.
Bolivia is also implementing a new constitution, albeit one that was arrived at through a more conflictual process over the course of two years. That constitution provides innovative new mechanisms for guaranteed indigenous participation in the legislature, a dual justice system involving the traditional Western system and indigenous-based community justice systems, popular elections of Supreme Court justices, and four levels of administrative autonomy including the national government, departmental governments, and indigenous areas. These will be very complex challenges and The Carter Center will explore whether we might contribute to Bolivia's continuing transformation.
In Brazil, we'll consult with political and economic leaders on the state of the region, particularly in the middle of the current financial crisis, and get an update on a health program that The Carter Center implements jointly with the Brazilian Minis try of Health. In collaboration with the Pan-American Health Program, Lions Club, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Carter Center is working to interrupt the transmission of river blindness, a parasitic disease transmitted by the bites of small black flies that breed in rapidly flowing streams and rivers in six countries in the Americas and in Africa. River blindness occurs when a person is bitten by infected black flies carrying larvae of worms that eventually mature into adult worms. The offspring of those worms, called microfilariae, swarm under the skin where they can infect other black flies when they bite. The larvae irritate the skin a nd cause intense itching, skin discoloration, and rashes. If they enter the eyes, they can eventually cause blindness. The transmission belt can be broken simply by having the infected persons take two medicine treatments per year. We hope that the transmission of river blindness will be successfully interrupted in the Americas by 2012.
Delegation Schedule
Tuesday, April 28 to Thursday, April 30
Regional conference on the right to access to information in Lima, Peru, hosted by The Carter Center.
Wednesday, April 29, 11 a.m.
Live webcast from FLACSO University in Quito, Ecuador. Brief remarks by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, followed by Q&A session.
Thursday, April 30
Human Rights Ombudsman Award ceremony in Lima, Peru. President Carter will receive award for his lifelong commitment to human rights.
Saturday, May 2
Media event with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, presidential palace, La Paz, Bolivia.
Carter Center Photo
Dr. Jennifer McCoy, Director
Carter Center Americas Program
Read her bio >
READ MORE:
May 6, 2009: Trip Report by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil: April 27 – May 5, 2009 >
April 29, 2009: Remarks by Former U.S. President Carter at FLACSO University in Ecuador >
President Carter to Lead Delegation to Latin America (English and Spanish)>
Carter Center Americas Program >
Access to Information Conference, April 28-30, Lima, Peru >
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