Carlos Quesada Director Latin America Program 1. I would like to thank Ms. Gay McDougall, UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues for organizing this Forum. Due to today’s time constraints, I would like to highlight the following: 2. Racism and racial discrimination have profoundly and lastingly marked and structured every single country in the Americas. This structural racism has affected the lives of more than 190 million Afro descendants and more than 40 million indigenous people in the hemisphere in all areas of life. It has led to their underrepresentation in government; limited access to education, housing; employment; wealth; healthcare and other basic services; among others. 3. Even though there have been some advances, thanks to the perseverance and resistance of communities of victims; such as the powerful struggle of the civil rights movement and the growing political confrontation of racism in the United States; or the quiet struggle of the Afro-Latino movement once democracy was reestablished in the region in the mid-1980s; little has been changed in general to improve the conditions of these minorities in our continent. 4. Socio-economic indicators show that poverty and race or ethnicity plus violence continue to overlap in the Hemisphere; from the streets of South Central Chicago; or S.E. in Washington D.C., or the Pacific basin in Colombia to the favelas in Rio de Janeiro or the Yungas region in Bolivia. 5. The overlap between poverty, race and violence creates structural problems and it is the biggest threat for democracies in the region. Poverty, being uneducated, unemployment or having a low paying job; inadequate or no housing and being regularly subjected to violence create a cycle of marginalization and exclusion of minorities throughout the Hemisphere and particularly affects Afro-descendant youth.