 privilege and a great personal pleasure to welcome you to our country and to this, our capital city. Only a year ago, President Kennedy brought to you and to your countrymen the goodwill and the good wishes which we of the United States feel so strongly for Costa Rica. Today, your visit symbolizes anew the growing strength of the friendly and cordial bonds between our countries. More than 100 years ago, representatives of your country and mine signed a treaty in which it was declared. There shall be perpetual amity between the United States and the Republic of Costa Rica. We can be proud in both our lands that the promise of those prophetic words has been fulfilled through all the years since 1851. We have worked together in the past with the spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation. We work together in that same spirit today. As good neighbors should, servicemen of the United States are today working side by side with Costa Ricans to ease the threat of floods in your country. But our common vision and our common hopes bring us together in greater enterprises for the betterment of the common future of all Americans. The work of the Alliance for Progress, which President Kennedy began, goes forward with growing momentum among all the good neighbors of this hemisphere. In your country, Mr. President, on the joint efforts of the Alliance, new homes and new schools are being built. Textbooks are being produced. Loans are being extended to farmers. The 12 million inhabitants of the five countries of Central America are benefiting from the common market that your countries are building. We are deeply gratified by the promise that this undertaking so clearly offers. As President Kennedy said when he visited your capital last year, the unique inter-American system of international cooperation is now demonstrating in this hemisphere that economic prosperity is the handmaiden of political liberty. The work all of us are in together, all free Americans in this new world, is a great enterprise that's filled with difficulty and challenge. But it is an enterprise befitting the revolutionary spirit of our peoples and their quest for independence and their search for social justice. We of the United States, Mr. President, are steadfast in our conviction and in our determination that we shall succeed in achieving the goals of our great alliance for progress. I am proud, Mr. President, to welcome you to the United States this morning as a fellow American, as a fellow partner in our hemispheric alliance, and as a fellow worker in the cause of peace and all mankind. Mr. President, Mr. Johnson, I am grateful for the warmth and generosity of your welcome. As you have so well said, there is a perpetual enmity between our countries. It has been expressed in countless ways over many years. You have our deep gratitude for the most recent manifestation of your enmity, the generous help of the United States in assisting my government and my country in meeting the great crisis resulting from the volcanic eruption of Mount Hirashu. In the area covered by floods or your magnificent CBSR, as you said, Mr. President, working side by side and shoulder to shoulder with Costa Ricans. This is a true meaning of perpetual enmity, the friendship of good neighborhoods who stand truly to help each other in their hour of disasters. The alliance for progress is indeed, as you point out, Mr. President, the supreme example of perpetual enmity which unites the hemisphere. What is more than that as you have widely perceived, the alliance unites us because it represents a philosophy of human dignity. In our preoccupation with the technical and social problems of development, we are prone to forget that the final objectives of our efforts is man himself. We need bridge. We need roads. We need regression systems. And we need a vast catalog of other scenes. But why shall these things have provided us if we forget to practice effective democracy? If we lose respect of human rights, if we sacrifice man's freedom at the price of economic accomplishments, we fight hunger, disease, and illiteracy under the banner of the alliance for progress. But let us always be mindful that the allocation of these courses of mankind are only the means to reach the end of man's struggle. The right of the people, the ordinary people, to be heard, the right of the people to be respected, the right of the people to become citizens of their countries instead of being very faceless inhabitants. It is my hope and pleasure that you are, that in your lifetime, Mr. President, and mine, we shall witness the fulfillment of Boliva's dream, political unification. And that the legislator of the North Central and South America will sit side by side in the parliament of the hemisphere. Mr. President, thank you again for your warm welcome. It is a great pleasure to visit again my second home as the guest of a good neighbor and fellow American whose leadership of the Continental Alliance is respected and admired throughout the Western Hemisphere.