Latin America is a rich and fascinating continent – rich in cultural diversity and history, rich in natural and mineral resources, and fascinating because of its people who, with great courage, vigour and imagination, have tried time and again to take their destiny into their own hands and find a better future for themselves and their children.

At the same time, Latin America is a continent marked by an extreme discrepancy between wealth on the one hand and poverty and exploitation on the other. Our solidarity and cooperation are designed to support those who, in the shadow of Latin America’s beauty, are reduced to a life of poverty, hunger, and exploitation.

In MISEREOR’s view, poverty in Latin America is fundamentally the result of unjust distribution of, and access to, existing resources and political decision-making. Our cooperation with the poor and disadvantaged and the groups in Church and society supporting them is therefore based on the following essential convictions:

• the poor themselves are the protagonists of social change. It is their potentials that need to be identified and promoted;
• furthering democracy, civic participation and human rights is at the core of our vision and activities;
• implementing sound professional approaches in the various sectors of development work and considering the political dimensions involved in development problems are just the two sides of the same coin to us;
• the projects and programmes we promote are designed ideally to set in motion a dynamic self-supporting process of social and political change;
• cooperation should be based on a spirit of partnership.