CARTAGENA, Colombia. - The international cooperation with the Caribbean in the war against drug-trafficking has been significantly reduced, said Thursday the Dominican Republic delegation in the Expanded Regional Summit on the World’s Drugs Problem, being held in the Colombian city Cartagena.

Dominican Foreign Relations vice minister Alejandra Liriano said the decrease in assistance contrasts with the increase in drug trafficking across the Caribbean basin. "The paradoxical thing is that while the Caribbean takes the impact of the large drug flows, the international cooperation has descended significantly in the last few years."

The drop in cooperation has left the countries in the area "at the mercy of its own resources and capacidades" to confront drug trafficking, Liriano said in the opening of the regional gathering, adding that the region is unable to transfer resources to the war on drugs, which had been anticipated for social spending.

International cooperation is one of the Summit’s central subjects, and that will conclude tomorrow after three days of tasks, two of them in the technical areas.

The presidents of El Salvador, Elías Saca; Guatemala, Alvaro Colom; Panama, Martin Torrijos; Dominican republic, Leonel Fernandez; Mexico, Felipe Calderón; Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and Colombia, Alvaro Uribe will meet in the Summit for a day.

In the encounter also participate delegates from Barbuda and Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Bahamas, Costa Rica, Cuba, Grenada, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Guayana, Haiti, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam, and Trinidad and Tobago.