Drug trafficking and widespread poverty are destabilising Latin America, according to many of the region’s leaders, gathered here for the 54th session of the UN General Assembly.

Although recent opening sessions of the currently 188-nation Assembly have formed the backdrop for enthusiasm about Latin America’s democratic and economic advances, this week’s plenary also has offered several cautionary speeches.

“The tranquility within the region is being disturbed by the alliance of drug traffickers with terrorists,” argued Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

“These criminal activities have achieved in some cases a power that is vast enough to challenge governments, aside from disturbing the world economy,” he said Tuesday.

President Andres Pastrana of Colombia, whose country has waged lengthy battles both with drug cartels and with left-wing guerrillas, urged UN members to increase penalties against drug traffickers.

“There won’t be peace in Colombia as long as greedy narcotrafficking businesses and the black market of weapons continue supplying illegal groups in my country,” he argued.

“We must especially fight contraband smuggling of industrial products to Colombia, which is a way of laundering drug money and asphyxiating Colombian industries,” Pastrana said. “And we must also halt the flow of precursor chemicals indispensable for the production of narcotics.”

The Colombian president asked for some 3.6 billion dollars in foreign aid over the next three years to combat drug production and trafficking in his country.

Pastrana – surrounded by military officials and bodyguards – showed one side of the region’s recent problems, particularly after countries faced the ripple effects of the Asian financial crisis over the past two years.

Hugo Chavez, an unsuccesful coup leader who was elected this year to be Venezuelan president, offered a different picture. In an effusive speech he recommended his country’s efforts to build “genuine democracy.”

Noting that some 80 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty despite the country’s oil reserves and other natural resources, Chavez said the government had tried to prevent “the breakdown of a country.”

He lauded the election of a new Constituent Assembly but criticised “disruptive” news reports that had labelled his reforms – which cut the powers of Venezuela’s elected legislature – “undemocratic.”

“In Venezuela, there has been, there is, and there will be respect for a democratic process that comes from the desires and the will of the people,” Chavez told the Assembly Tuesday.

He noted that, in the six months since his government took office, school enrolment has risen by about 25 percent, following years in which high registration fees had discouraged attendance.

Other leaders – including Fujimori, who also severely cut legislative powers in a 1992 “self-coup” that gave him wider powers – argued that globalisation could lead to “renewed frustration” if it does not show results for developing nations.

If economies faced “unequal or unjust terms of exchange,” Fujimori argued, the consequences could compel some governments to “take up once more economic proposals that had already been set aside.”

Pastrana added that nations must “seriously consider and give priority to creating a new financial structure” because uncontrolled capital flows have brought “economic turbulence, unemployment, more poverty and, in some cases, political instability.”

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu echoed these remarks.

He declared that Guatemala, like much of Latin America, had suffered deceleration and financial contraction, exacerbated by the rising cost of oil imports and the lingering impact on Central America of Hurricane Mitch.