Jul 11, 2006, 1:19 GMT
Panama City - The integration of Central American energy markets tops the agenda Tuesday when leaders from ten countries meet in Panama - with an eye to cooperation with their larger regional partners Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia.
Trade, migration and regional social and economic plans will also topics for the presidents and representatives of Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Panama.
Colombia is expected to use the meeting to sell the idea that the construction of the Colombia-Venezuela gas pipe - kicked off Saturday with a festive ground-breaking ceremony - will benefit Central America.
Colombia's Foreign Minister Carolina Barco on Monday said the pipeline, being built at a cost to Venezuela of at least 230 million dollars, will allow a better supply for Panama and eventually for other countries, and would provide a regional integration tool.
Venezuela has the largest reserves of natural gas in the region, but has a deficit in its Western areas that will be covered by imports from Colombia.
Under President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has been moving to build an energy consortium among his neighbours as a counterbalance to the influence of foreign energy companies and the United States. For the long term, the Colombia-Venezuela project also foresees the construction of a second duct to Colombia's Pacific Coast to facilitate the export of oil to Asia.
'It is vital to keep up these concrete integration efforts, which also allow us to improve the welfare of our peoples. We have two countries which have gas, others that do not, and this is the best way to gradually balance and improve the situation,' Barco said.
Panama, Colombia's neighbour, Monday indicated its designs on becoming a regional centre for energy distribution in Central America. Panama's First Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro said his country offers the best geographic and maritime conditions to harbour one or more large refineries.
Such an arrangement would offer the economy of large scale and allow the region to profit from the cheaper prices attached to the processing of greater volumes of oil.
Mexico and Venezuela have both suggested the construction of refineries in Central America, with estimated investments in excess of, for comparison's sake, the 5.25 billion being proposed for the expansion of the Panama Canal.
The region has already made major steps toward regional energy integration with the Central American Electrical Interconnection Project (SIEPAC), to be operational at the beginning of 2008 at the latest, which will provide cheaper prices. The network includes 1,830 kilometres of 230 kilovolts (Kv) wiring between Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, at a cost of 230 million dollars.
Nicaragua is short of 100 kilowatt hours of energy and suffers power cuts of up to six hours a day, the Spanish distributor Union Fenosa said Monday, and is hoping to find solutions at the summit.
The summit is taking place under the umbrella of the Central American Integration System (SICA)- a loose trade union formed in the 1990s to answer and emulate other regional trade groups, such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Two regional integration agreements - the 1991 Mechanism of Tuxtla Gutierrez and the 2001 Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP) - will be on the agenda at the meeting, with the aim of developing social and economic plans and integration of road traffic and telecommunications, Mexico's undersecretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean, Jorge Chen, said.
The situation of migrants from the region who head for the US would also be discussed, Chen said - especially with the US Congress divided on whether to crack down on the estimated 400,000 people who cross the US border from Mexico every year, or make it possible for them to receive temporary visas.
Many of those 400,000 illegal immigrants traverse north across Mexico from Central America.
The issue 'is now a matter of primary importance,' Chen said.
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