The New York Times - Thursday, December 12, 2002
Ginger Thompson

But Unicef officials also reported that while traditional problems like infant mortality and illiteracy are slowly diminishing, others, including AIDS, the trafficking in girls and domestic violence present new and difficult challenges.

Deaths of children younger than 5 were reduced in Latin America by about 25 percent over the past decade, said Per Engebak, Unicef's regional director, at a news conference marking the release of the agency's annual report, "The State of the World's Children." In the same period, he said, polio was eradicated and tetanus was reduced by 90 percent.

Mr. Engebak also said that universal basic education was within reach, with 94 percent of eligible children enrolled in elementary school.

However, he added, Latin America remains the most economically unequal region of the world, with severe consequences for most of its children. Almost half a million Latin American children die each year of curable ailments, including dehydration and respiratory illnesses, he said. About two million people in the region, or 0.5 percent, have contracted H.I.V. And the number of children in Latin American and Caribbean children orphaned by the spread of AIDS has reached 195,000, putting the region second only to sub-Saharan Africa.

At least 85,000 children a year die in domestic violence, the Unicef report said. And in Argentina, still suffering the aftershocks of an economic crisis, malnutrition among children is a serious problem.

"Usually the images of the economic turmoil are adult men," said Carol Bellamy, the executive director of Unicef. "But the people who bear the largest brunt of such economic and political crises are children."

The Unicef report's main focus was a call for nations to allow children greater participation in developing solutions to the problems that affect them.

Last May, the United Nations held its first special session devoted to children, opening the floor to delegations of children and adolescents from around the world. And today, a similar meeting brought together children from Latin America and the Caribbean to discuss their concerns. The children and the Unicef report described programs organized by adolescents in Brazil and the Dominican Republic aimed at combating violence against street children and promoting quality education.

Gabriela Azurduy, 13, of Bolivia, said at the meeting: "We are not the source of problems. We are the resources you need to resolve them."

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