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LATIN AMERICA |
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Pope
Lauds '84 Argentina-Chile Peace Agreement
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI hailed a
1984 Vatican-mediated friendship agreement
between Argentina and Chile as a "luminous
example" of peace winning out over war
during an audience Saturday with the
presidents of both countries.
In 1978, when both nations were ruled by
military dictators, Chile and Argentina
nearly went to war over three tiny islands
in the Beagle Channel off Chile's southern
Pacific shores. The dispute was solved by
mediation by Pope John Paul II in 1984.
Benedict marked the 25th anniversary of the
treaty during a Vatican audience Saturday
with Presidents Cristina Fernandez of
Argentina and Michelle Bachelet of Chile.
The Vatican said the pope met with each
president separately, then delivered his
speech to their joint delegations in the
Vatican's Clementine Hall.
Benedict called the agreement a "luminous
example of the strength of the human spirit
and the desire for peace over the barbarity
and uselessness of violence and war."
Quoting the World War II era pontiff Pope
Pius XII he said: "Nothing is lost with
peace; everything can be lost with war."
But he said that for peace to be
consolidated, there needs to be a fight
against poverty and corruption, guaranteed
access to education, economic growth and the
eradication of violence and exploitation of
women and children.
Dressed in black, the two presidents also
prayed before John Paul's tomb in the
grottos underneath St. Peter's Basilica and
visited the Vatican hall where the peace
agreements were signed Nov. 29, 1984.
Upon arriving in Rome, the Argentine
chancellor Jorge Taiana said the audience
would be "a historic round of much joy and
renewed alliance as we stop and think about
how far we've come in the last 25 years."
John Paul intervened in the dispute in 1979,
a year after he was elected pope, and the
treaty signing some five years later marked
his first concrete diplomatic achievement.
The Beagle negotiations marked the first
papal mediation of a territorial dispute
since Pope Leo XXIII stepped into a
Spanish-German controversy over the Caroline
Islands in the Pacific in 1885. |
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