Whether it is the sexual exploitation of children in Mexico, where some 16,000 boys and girls are forced into prostitution, the 300,000 children in Nicaragua who do not go to school, the millions of children who work or the systematic extermination of street children in Brazil, the situation of a child in this region is likely to be miserable.

There are bright spots. Venezuela in 2001 created special courts to defend children in matters of physical abuse, adoption, exploitation and access to education, DPA reported.

Brazil pays poor families six dollars a month for every child kept in school - to compensate for lost income from their work as laborers.

And although Brazil has failed to meet goals set by UNICEF to improve the lot of its children, vaccination campaigns in Brazil cover more than 90 percent of children and the rate of child illiteracy has dropped from 20 percent in 1990 to 13.3 percent. Ninety-six percent of children are assured basic schooling, according to official statistics.

Brazil has also made progress in reducing the infant mortality rate from 47.8 deaths per 1,000, to 33.5 deaths. Venezuela has brought down infant mortality from 23.9 per 1,000 in 1994 to 16.

Socialist Cuba has gone beyond the goals set at the UN World Children's Health Summit in 1990. Cuba's infant mortality rate is on par with Canada's and even lower than the United States' rate.

Only 6.2 Cuban infants per 1,000 live births die before one month, and only 8.3 die before age five, according to Sonia Beretervie, a Cuban official.

But for the most part, the record is one of failure to protect society's youngest and most vulnerable.

Children make up a third of Mexico's population, and for the millions of minors at the lower end of the social scale, life is precarious. It is they who take the brunt of malnutrition, ill- health, lack of education and exploitation of the country's estimated 40 million poor people.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 3.5 million Mexican children are forced to work for a living. Another 170,000 children live on city streets with 15,000 homeless children in Mexico City alone.

The picture dims as one moves south into Central America. Natural disasters have aggravated pre-existing poverty, and three out of every five Central Americans live in poverty.

In Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America, 1.6 million children live in poverty, and for every 1,000 children born alive in Nicaragua, 17 die before one month, and 50 die by age five.

Across the region, children comprise a disproportionate percentage of the poor. In Brazil, children under 15 constitute 45 percent of nearly 50 million poor, according to researcher Marcelo Nery. In Venezuela, an estimated 5 million children - out of the country's total population of 22 million - are poor.

The same is true in Argentina, wracked by its worst economic crisis in history, where more than half of the country's 12.9 million children live in poverty - a record number since such statistics have been collected.