UN General Assembly
1999

we have to say that the growth rate is still insufficient and unfair. As in other countries, development was focused on a particular segment of Bolivian society. Therefore the fight against poverty is the main task of the Government of President Bánzer. Thus the cornerstone of that strategy is the active participation of the very sectors that had been ignored in choosing ways and means through an intelligent and active decentralization mechanism. There is full awareness that access to the means of production should be added to the effort that has already been made in allocating resources to social, educational and health policies. At the beginning of the 1980s, when we began the democratic stage I have just described, illicit drug trafficking cast a long shadow over development in Bolivia. At the critical moment of the collapse of tin mining, the cultivation of coca leaves employed thousands 9 of families of unemployed workers and became a major source of income for the Bolivian economy. Even worse, however, was that the risk that drug trafficking would