Remarks at the Headquarters of the Organization of Central American States, San Salvador, El Salvador.

Mr. Secretary General and my very dear friends:

I have just come from a luncheon meeting with your Presidents. We all have to thank you for asking us here and bringing us together again. I know that you have worked around the clock to make this conference a success. Your labors have been hard, but I think you will agree that pressure can prove a team's worth and can prove the value of our cause. And you have proven both. You have performed magnificently under your Secretary General and his partners in this enterprise.

ODECA is new as an international organization. Your first 10 years were the testing time. You stood the test so well that in 1965 you received a new mandate for leadership in the integration movement. Your Presidents have reaffirmed that mission here.

We all know that here in this lovely old mansion is a house of new ideas. This staff, this building houses so much of your peoples' hopes, so much of the better life and future that will be theirs to share.

You know that progress for Central America is rooted in regional integration and fed by economic growth and education. Political accommodation which you foster and advance is indispensable to both. That is the new road that we are going to travel together.

Sometimes it is your job to go out and scout the road, to encounter and overcome the difficulties that always accompany such a vast new venture as this. Your reward--and it is coming--will be seen in the faces of children who will come down the road that you have helped to open. They will make long hours and hot arguments worthwhile, if we have faith and trust in ourselves and in our future as neighbor nations of one great and growing hemisphere.

I believe deeply in your cause and I believe in you. I commend you and I will continue to rely on you.

Thank you all for your welcome and for the wonderful work that you carry on. And thank you most of all for inviting me to come by to see you.