November 14, 2023, Dave Rivard, Executive Director of the Ministry of Design and Developmment, dedicated to new National Library of El Salvador – Binaes.
“I am very honored to be here with this prestigious group today. Mr. Vice President, thank you for this generous opportunity. Originally, I had some words of thanks prepared for the generous patrons of our National Library to the Chinese people and the Chinese government. Their gift in making our national library possible actually celebrated and contributed to why we are here today, with their wise introspection and contribution to SDG’s 4,8 and 9. China actually re-affirmed the Rio Declaration on environment and development with this gift. It is a partnership for survival I will explain later.
Knowing, full well, that I would be the oldest in the room, I thought I would share the historic part of the SDG’s, having experienced, and even participated, with much of their genesis over my lifetime. In 1994 I had another prestigious opportunity, to present at the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Institutions (Word Bank and the IMF) in 1944, but as a patron of the event. Soon after, the other enabling institutions of a sorely needed post war reconstruction effort, all parents of the SDG’s, were established: The UN, 1945 in San Francisco, UNESCO, FAO 1945, UNICEF, 1946, New York, World Health Organization, 1948.
It wasn’t until June 5, 1972 that the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, was established (remembering that the US Environmental Protection Act and Agency was created in the same year). I knew the Deputy Director of the UN back then, Maurice Strong, also the Secretary General of both The UN Conference on the Human Environment and it’s 20-year re-evaluation, UNCED or the Rio Earth Summit, who wisely chose its director Noel Brown. Much in the spirit that ADDN was created, Noel Brown and Maurice lead the charge to integrate, at last, every nation that would listen, and every relevant UN Agency that needed to participate to become what was known as “The partnership for survival into the 21st century”.
Both the underlayment and the definition of our current SDG’s were defined at these conferences. 26 Sustainable Principles were adopted at Stockholm. Principles, and I might add legal responsibilities through legal mandated conventions, that carry over today, such as “Prevention of Environmental Harm”, “Right to Develop in an Environmental Context”, “Precautionary Actions”, “Interface of Trade and the Environment” and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities. One was added in Rio 20 years later, the “Principle of Subsidiarity”, to complete Rio’s 27 Principles of Sustainable Development.
As directors of government agencies here, I think we can all attest, in our daily workplaces, that our president’s direction, and in fact in every decision and directive, has all of our agencies actively practicing all 17 SDG’s. Our President doesn’t care to produce the worlds cheapest avocado, if it devastates our farmland while our farmers have to interface with probable Mexican cartels on its way to market. He doesn’t even really care about the State Department’s website that stubbornly, and falsely, warns visitors about the criminality in our country. (Our office even gets Chinese investors who ask about our security situation because they go to the State Department website.) He cites that people can find out the truth about our country on their own as we have an overwhelming number of investors who have already discovered our truth.By all metrics, previous administrations have left our country with the highest levels of crime, homicide and “Political collusion with transnational criminal syndicated networks” in the world. In our case, it was literally a matter of life and death for almost every community, and government action, because the primary foundation to achieving sustainable development was related to security, and the government corruption that allowed it to persist.
As President Obama said at the Millenium Development Conference in 2000, “Sustainable Development cannot be achieved by governments that do not provide peace and support corruption.” And “Peace can then transcend into bread, rice, opportunity, health and education”. By those same metrics, within three years of the President finally controlling his own budget, we are the best in the Americas. With metrics that have been totally reversed. But there are still those that want to keep development the way it was. Sustainable Development threatened by old attitudes. Corruption that syphoned away millions in well intentioned sustainable development projects by the global community, and the government structures that benefited from it happening. Development projects that we are still paying interest on.
We are now in the critical phase of our own Economy in Transition (The UN uses the term EIT’s), due to the fundamental requisite of Peace and Prosperity through Security, in order to pursue the SDG’s in earnest, because of peace in the countryside. Yes, in UN language, we transformed from a totally dysfunctional centralized government to an EIT. We have become an EIT precisely because there existed a form of central planning, and certainly control, with most businesses under control of the Maras. Businesses and even coffee workers and land owners that paid taxes, but to a non-state entity. It was indeed most of the country and businesses and even government and we must not lose that lesson to the sunny days we have in front of us. The clouds are gone, but the UN must also help us rebuild a government that persists with the current optimism of our current ministers. We must create, yes, create and not duplicate, new and more efficient government structures.
The president, in recognizing that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis, would have made a great delegate at Rio. He has created our “roadmap for survival into the 21st. century, through actions, and, as we have found out, he is difficult to keep up with. As we further link ourselves with the global “blueprint for survival for the 21st. century, through the funders, the enablers, and the architects of the “plan of action” as articulated in the SDG’s, we call upon the Bretton Woods Institutions assigned to the task of helping us along our path to achieve sustainable development into the 21st century.
We note, and experience each day, on the one hand our new freedom to start new businesses and enjoy our cities and country sides with the freedom of peace. We can now ignite new businesses based upon peace. Our President is harnessing the resources of our interconnected world. On the other hand, our inherited debt imposes, limits our bond rating capacity to attract the private investment we need to share our resources with countries that are also our “Partners for survival into the 21st century. We ask you to help us enhance SDG article 16 in order to build the governmental structures we need to sustain our environmentally stable path into the 21st century.
So, once again, I want to thank all of you who are present at these objectives, who are working along the same lines as our President, and the international cooperation who are increasingly relying on the work that we as a Government are doing for a better El Salvador. I also thank the Bretton Woods institutions who have been assigned this task since 1944, and who have worked hard under the pressures of what this country originally offered. We need one another as we continue down the road from Rio.
DAVE RIVARD
The new library even features paintings of our favorite humanitarian artist Miguel Angel Ramirez.
in Febrary, 2023 President Nayib Bukele laid the first stone
The President Nayib Bukele, accompanied by the Chinese ambassador, Ou Jianhong, laid the first stone last night for the construction of the new National Library of El Salvador (Binaes), a work that is being carried out in the heart of the city of San Salvador thanks to the non-reimbursable cooperation of the People’s Republic of China.