Recovery Efforts in Guatemala Following Hurricane Stan

Rosa and I talked about her dreams that her children would be able to go to school. Her oldest one is nine, her youngest one is two. One of the things that I am going to talk with my fellow Americans about when I get back is ways that perhaps America can help to support and work with our Embassy and USAID to help support some of the children in Guatemala to be able to afford to go to school rather than having to work to help support their families.

We also visited Panabaj and talked with people there who experienced the horror of seeing a huge wall of water come rushing through their neighborhood and destroy many many homes and wipe out many families and cause such terrible loss of life and destruction.

Despite that we witnessed a great deal of pride and resilience and hope because everywhere we saw the smiling faces of eager children.

My country is a very generous country and we want to help the children of Guatemala to realize their dreams and to realize a bright potential for the future. We talked with your President about his optimism for the future of Guatemala and the many hopeful things that are happening in this country with the coming of CAFTA and its potential to create jobs and greater opportunity for people here.

One of the very unique things about America is that we do not rely on Government to do everything alone. Our government works in partnership. In the case of helping here, in the aftermath of the hurricane, our government worked in partnership. Our military came in and helped and our private sector, our private citizens also want to help. I am delighted today to have brought with me two of America’s leading business executives.

Both PepsiCo. and Deere and Company have operations here and long ties here and they very much want to be involved in helping Guatemala. So these executives are going to return to the United States with me and we are going to be talking with our fellow citizens and their fellow business leaders to see how we can continue in partnership with the American government to help the people of Guatemala. It was a joy to visit your country and we are proud to be your friend and partner.

Robert Lane, CEO Deere and Company: Buenas tardes. Para mi es un honor estar con la Under secretary Hughes aquí con la gente de Guatemala. Cuando la gente trabaja juntos es bueno. What I saw today was people working together. I was very impressed with the way that the people and the government of Guatemala have worked together with USAID, with U.S. military and with various charities and non governmental agencies who have pulled together in a very difficult time. My heart goes out to all the people here, but specially those who have suffered so much. I was particularly impressed with one of the mayors that we met today who, rather than just talking, was acting. It was clear that a plan was in place and that the energy of the Guatemalan people would soon bring a restoration and an actually an improvement in the conditions. So together with the Under Secretary I will be going back and sharing this story of hope and a good impression on my part. Often people aren’t aware how efficient, under very difficult conditions, such activities can be conducted. So it was an honor to be able to travel with the Foreign Minister today. Thank you for hosting us, and I will look forward to continuing to see the progress and will be continuing to know that working together will produce great fine results. Thank you.

Steven Raymond, PepsiCo: Mr. Foreign Minister, thank you for your kind hospitality today. It was a real privilege to be able to visit this country with such warm hospitality. Your Foreign Minister spent the whole day with us and that is quite extraordinary. We appreciate that very much. And for me it was an inspiration, a motivation, and quite impressive to see the people of Guatemala working together to rebuild their country. I have to say I was not expecting to see so much progress in such a short period of time, and to see the friendly can do, positive attitude of the people. Young children and adults working together to rebuild this country was very motivating. So, I think I got more from visiting today than anything that we could bring back to this country. And I thank you for that. I also appreciate the opportunity to visit with your President, your Vice President, and to thank them for their economic support for those businesses that operate in your country. We are privileged to be able to operate a business here. We have two businesses. We have a wonderful business partner in our Pepsi bottler here and we also have a Frito Lay. Both of those businesses are growing. And the President made it very clear that the most important thing that we in the business community can do to help the economy and help your people get back to where they want to be is to help grow our businesses. So, with their support and leadership, the Foreign Minister’s support, that is exactly what we want to do. But I am also going back to the United States with Secretary Hughes’ leadership and a raising awareness of what can be done to help your citizens continue the rebuilding effort. And I, like the Secretary, was most impressed with the desire for education. And if there is something that we can do to aid in that effort, certainly we want to do that. And that is the message that I will take back. Again, thank you for your warm hospitality. Thank you for the support that you give American businesses here in Guatemala. And I will tell you that I will go back and make sure that my piers back in the United States understand how gracious a country this is. So thank you very much.

Rene Rodriguez, Diario de Centro America: After you have seen the devastation caused by Stan, can you share with us some of the ideas that you have about the contributions that you could be making so that our people could rise again and so that those dreams with transformation as you have mentioned here can come to a reality.

Under Secretary Karen Hughes: Well, a couple of things. First of all, my country’s government, the United States, has provided $16 million in relief and recovery efforts to date, including our early emergency relief, our ongoing USAID assistance. We met today with AID workers who are out working with people to help with temporary shelter, to help deliver food, we have made a big contribution to the food program to try to make sure that we get food to people who are hungry. I know our military assisted in delivering some of those supplies. So those are programs that are ongoing. The weak construction, the shelter, the delivery of food. Some of the things that we were talking about today is that what we might do into the future, one of the things that the President emphasized and our meeting, was the importance of the private sector doing what they are doing, which is working in Guatemala and creating jobs in Guatemala and how optimistic he was, that as we implement CAFTA and free trade, that the benefits will be clear to people in Guatemala. That free trade will result in increased jobs and employment and greater opportunity. Another idea that we talked about is trying to encourage either donations or purchases of land so that we can help some of the people who have been displaced from their land by the floods and the mudslides. The third idea, was the idea that education that we talked about, about trying to work on some sort of micro scholarship program to help low income children be able to afford to go to school. In many cases we were told their families needed to put them to work or to have their income to help the family survive, and so we are going to be working with our Embassy on perhaps a program to expand some micro scholarships to help make those available to young children so that their families can afford to send them to school.

Martin Rodriguez, Prensa Libre: Buenas noches. Para la Secretaria Hughes y para los empresarios. Yo quiero saber si ustedes al regresar a Estados Unidos van a hacer dos cosas: 1) Como los empresarios a los que el Presidente Bush encargo buscar fondos para Pakistan, van a crear un fondo y si esto ha funcionado en Pakistan; 2) y si tomando en cuenta que no solo es importante la ayuda, sino que tambien los guatemaltecos en Estados Unidos ayuden para la reconstruccion, podrian sugerir al Gobierno de Estados Unidos otorgar el TPS que ha solicitado Guatemala.

Under Secretary Karen Hughes: Let me address the TPS status issue first. I am very aware that your Government has requested that and submitted all the appropriate information. It is being reviewed by our Government. It is a very difficult issue for the United States, as you might imagine. It is a difficult issue for any country when you work hard to secure your borders. I think ultimately in the long term the answer is in the immigration reform proposal that President Bush has made and that he reiterated this week, which includes both strong security along the borders and also a temporary guest worker program so that people from Guatemala who come to the United States to perform jobs that we need done, that my country’s economy needs, that our employers need performed in our country can be done on a legal basis where workers can then be free to come for a period of three years, go back and forth between the two countries and then have that extended again for another three years if they so choose. That will help bring the workers out of the shadows and make them a more regular part of the American economy and we think that is a very significant reform that could be a very important step forward. President Bush intends to work very hard for that immigration reform.

Robert Lane, CEO Deere and Company: On the first part of the question, Under Secretary Hughes has agreed that I would attempt to answer that. We are actually going back to the United States in the next couple of days. On Wednesday I will be in Washington with Under Secretary Hughes and we will be speaking to the business roundtable, which is an association of CEO’s of many of the largest, most of the largest companies in the United States, and Secretary Hughes will be discussing her trip to Pakistan and also the trip here. I will also be sharing with my fellow CEO’s some of the observations that Steve and I have made which we earlier shared with you. So I think that is one example of fairly rapid dissemination of the benefits we got of being here in this country.

Edwin Castro, Tele Diario: I would like to know what type of assistance does the U.S.A. envision being able to provide our country for reconstruction, so that we do not merely reconstruct things but that we can move forward and ensure a better quality of life and see improvements come out of these reconstruction efforts, so that the people can see some sustainable future coming along. The second part of my question is, what is the form of assistance that both JP Morgan, the bank, and that PepsiCo expect to bring to Guatemala.

Under Secretary Karen Hughes: In our meeting with your President and Vice President, the Vice President spoke about working closely with USAID, which is our aid and development agency, to try to bring about the rural transformation that you have been working for. He was very complementary of USAID. Our USAID budget here in Guatemala, I believe, is about $45 million dollars a year, which is quite significant. USAID has been working very closely in cooperation with the Government here to be sure that those funds are spent very effectively, to not only reconstruct and re develop, but also to do so in a way that does improve fundamentally the quality of life. Again, one of the things that we talked about and that your President made very emphatic during our meeting was that one of the best things that we can do is precisely what these CEO’s and their businesses are doing. That is to create driving businesses here that create jobs and opportunities, because once you have a job then you begin to be able to afford better education and health care and a better living environment, and you begin to be able to improve your own life. The best assistance program is frequently a job and that is what these business leaders are working to provide right here in Guatemala.

Steven Raymond, PepsiCo: I can’t answer for JP Morgan, but just let me give you a little understanding of how we look at this type of disaster at PepsiCo. I think I represent many other American companies as we look at these disasters. As we all are quite unfortunately familiar, in the last year we have had natural disasters all over the world and it has been a very unusual past twelve months. During those twelve months we at PepsiCo, as I said, other companies are very similar to this, we have assessed the situation either directly or had others asses the situation, like we are doing here today. We have provided $7 million worth of disaster relief around the world in the last twelve months from PepsiCo. When we come back under Secretary Hughes’ direction, we will develop a plan and we certainly at PepsiCo. will be supporting that plan and asking other companies to support it as well. In terms of the specifics, really the reason for coming down here was to really get a better feel for what needs to be done and then we can go back and try to do our best to raise money to support that. I would say that one of the messages that I am going to bring back from my visit today is that the Guatemalan people aren’t waiting for aid, they are getting to work themselves and that is very impressive, and so much has been done in such a short period of time that that is very encouraging. That will, I think, encourage the Americans who are inclined to give, to support efforts like this because they have seen so much effort that has gone in before and already. So I can’t tell you the specifics, but that is the sort of way we look at it and that is the reason we are down here.