And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north.

The biggest development failures tend to be in rural areas far from the coast. Communities living in mountainous areas, such as in the Andes, or Central Asia, or the highlands of East Africa, are especially isolated.

Cocaine used to be America s problem, to the point that the United States started a major campaign against sellers and consumers of crack cocaine in the inner cities, drug traffickers, and suppliers in the Andes. But now demand for cocaine in most of the world is stable or dropping.

Its text embraced the concerns expressed in General Assembly resolution 59 238 and contained new paragraphs reflecting the recommendation in the report of the Secretary General on the status of sustainable mountain development (A 60 309) and the Mountain Partnership's Declaration of the Andes of 29 October 2004.

The failures of economic development in the Andes, Central Asia, and Africa contribute to global instability, local insurrections and violence, drug trafficking, and bases for terrorism. Military approaches alone will not work, because the root of the problem is the vulnerability of poor, hungry people to the prophets of hate.

The representative of Peru said that the proposed country programme would aid the Government in achieving the Millennium Development Goals was framed within the decentralization process was based on human rights integrated a gender perspective and focused on the areas of the Andes, the Amazon and the marginal urban areas.

To be sure, Iran s alliances are vulnerable to erosion and, in the case of two staunch allies, Syria and Venezuela, to outright collapse. The end of Chavismo would threaten Iran s vast interests in Venezuela and its considerable presence in the Andes, while the fall of the Assad dynasty would be a devastating blow to Iran s regional strategy.

The Europeans who conquered and colonized the Americas after 1492 did not find vast empty lands, as they sometimes proclaimed, but rather lands populated by communities dating back thousands of years. A large portion of the indigenous populations quickly succumbed to diseases and hardships brought by the European colonizers, but many survived, often in dominant numbers, as in Bolivia and much of the highlands of the Andes mountain region.

But the language used by the Obama administration to describe the violence and state corruption that snakes from the Andes to the US border is starting to capture new thinking on narcotics. Three former Latin American presidents, Mexico s second richest man, Ricardo Salinas, and the Supreme Court of Argentina, among others, have criticized the war on drugs as a manifest failure that has lowered street prices, fueled production, and undermined weak states.