Ger­ard Best

The Sixth Sum­mit of Heads of States and/or Gov­ern­ment of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean States (ACS) takes place at the Yu­catan Siglo XXI Con­ven­tion Cen­trein Meri­da, Mex­i­cofrom April 30.ACS Sec­re­tary Gen­er­alAl­fon­so Munera and Mex­i­can No­bel Prize win­ner Mario Moli­na are list­ed to de­liv­er re­marks at the high-pro­file event.

One high­light of the Sum­mit is a pre­sen­ta­tion of the "New Ini­tia­tives for the Ben­e­fit of the Caribbean" of­fered by the gov­ern­ment of Mex­i­co.

To pre­pare the work agen­da for the Sum­mit, Mex­i­co Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs, Jos� An­to­nio Meade, is vis­it­ing­var­i­ous Caribbean na­tions, in­clud­ing Bar­ba­dos, Guyana and Trinidad and To­ba­go, Pren­sa Latinare­port­ed.

In the par­tic­u­lar case of Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, and Trinidad and To­ba­go, Meade will re­new his Gov­ern­ment's in­vi­ta­tion so that they par­tic­i­pate in the III CARI­COM Sum­mit, which will take place in par­al­lel to the meet­ing of the ACS.

Meade's re­cent­ly com­plet­ed­vis­its to Do­mini­ca, SaintLu­cia, SaintVin­cent and the Grenadines, and Haiti. An eval­u­a­tion of the Plan of Ac­tion of Petion-Ville, which came out of the last Sum­mit in Haiti, is ex­pect­ed to fea­ture on the ACS Sixth Sum­mit agen­da.

Re­la­tions with the wider Caribbean are sig­nif­i­cant toMex­i­co.In ad­di­tion to ge­o­graph­i­cal prox­im­i­ty, the cen­tral Amer­i­can na­tion has his­tor­i­call­inks with this re­gion.An agreee­ment on tech­ni­cal co­op­er­a­tion was­signed by Cari­com lead­er­ship and the gov­ern­ment of Mex­i­co as far back as­May 18, 1990.The main is­sues fos­tered by this Latin Amer­i­can na­tion through this re­gion­al mech­a­nism are the pre­ven­tion and at­ten­tion of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, sus­tain­able tourism, short sea ship­ping, and in­fra­struc­ture.