Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you the following speech, which I find to be of utmost importance. I would like to highlight how the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro Urrego, delivered his speech. He did not read it from a written script, which means that he didn’t prepare any; instead he spoke every word straight from his mind and heart. The following is the speech President Petro gave at the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, dated September 20th, 2022. It is as follows:
“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth. There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, on the land… I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a country of bloody beauty. My country is not only beautiful, it is also violent. How can beauty be combined with death? How can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is to blame for breaking the spell with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who leads us to destruction as a nation and as a people? My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon Jungle, the Chocó Jungle, the waters, the Andes Mountain ranges, and the oceans. There in those jungles, planetary oxygen is released and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of those plants that absorbs CO2, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, it is the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas.
As in a paradoxical crossroads, the jungle that is trying to be saved is at the same time destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they throw poisons, glyphosate, en masse that runs through the waters; they arrest their growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, a million Latin Americans are murdered and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they cry from the north, but the plant is just one more plant among the millions that perish when they unleash fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by states and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the Jungle as one of the great climatic pillars does not matter. For the power relations of the world, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate oneself, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs in order to be able to anesthetize more. Nothing more hypocritical than the speech to save the Jungle. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it. The jungle, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs the planetary CO2 evaporates. The saving jungle is seen in my country as the enemy to defeat, as the undergrowth to be extinguished. The space of coca and of the peasants who cultivate it, because they have nothing else to cultivate, is demonized.
For you, my country is of no interest to you except to throw poisons into your jungles, take your men to jail and throw your women into exclusion. They are not interested in the child’s education, but rather in killing his jungle and extracting the coal and oil from his entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poisons is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere. We serve them to excuse the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that lead them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them their problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, its plants, its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites persecute the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, that of power, that of money. What is more poisonous for humanity: cocaine, coal or oil? The opinion of the power has ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be persecuted, so it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and more by the mixtures that its ruled clandestine causes, but, instead, coal and oil must be protected, so that its use can extinguish all mankind. These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts down on existence, the fault lies with the jungle and those who inhabit it. Bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful on earth can no longer even be spent in the time of centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial summons to competition fills it with noise and drugs. Addiction to money and having has another face: drug addiction in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race they have transformed humanity into. The disease of loneliness will not be cured by glyphosate on the jungles. The jungle is not to blame. The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows, yes, that the pockets of power are filled with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of its world power. Give a blow of reason to his power. Turn on the lights of the century again.
The war on drugs has lasted 40 years. If we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose due to fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. You will see millions of Afro-Americans being imprisoned in their private prisons. The imprisoned Afro will become the business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will be murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, they will see the dream of democracy die both in my America and in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great Western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed. Mortal consumption has increased, from soft drugs to harder ones. There has been a genocide on my continent and in my country; millions of people have been sentenced to prison. To hide their own social guilt they have blamed the Jungle and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with no reason. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. Reducing drug use does not need wars, it needs us all to build a better society: a more supportive, more affectionate society, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and the new slaveries.
Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think of a rational exercise of power. Do not touch the beauty of my country with your poisons. Help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models, they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer millennia, not even centuries. Science set off the alarm, and we stopped listening to it. The war served as an excuse for us not to take the necessary measures. When actions were most needed, when speeches no longer served, when it was essential to deposit money in the funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to get away from coal and oil as soon as possible, one war and another and another were invented. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, and Libya and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse for not acting against the climate crisis. The wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will end the human species. If you observe that the peoples are filled with hunger and thirst and migrate by millions to the north, towards where the water is; so you lock them up, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. They expel them as if they were not human beings; they quintuple the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, they reproduce 1933 on a planetary scale.
The great triumph of the assault on reason. Do they not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on their countries is to return to the water to fill the rivers and the fields to be filled with nutrients? The climatic disaster fills us with viruses that swarm us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into merchandise. They propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity is in letting the market and greed act without planning, giving up the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed. Why war if what we need is to save the human species? What is NATO and empires for, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climatic disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well: it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital. The cause of climate disaster is capital. The logic of relating to each other to consume more and more, produce more and more, and so that some earn more and more produces climate disaster. They articulated the logic of expanded accumulation, the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the chemical change of the atmosphere that is deeper and more deadly. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death. From the jungle lands and beauty. There where they decided to make an enemy of an Amazon jungle plant, extradite and imprison its growers.
I invite you to stop the war, and to stop the climatic disaster. Here, in this Amazon Jungle, there is a failure of humanity. Behind the bonfires that burn her, after her poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, is the true addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit and money. Here is the huge deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity. As president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodstained and violent, I propose to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I summon all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite, to defeat the irrational that tortures our body. I call on you to save the Amazon Rainforest in its entirety with the resources that can be allocated to life worldwide. If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate the money to weapons than to life, then reduce the external debt to free up our own budget spaces and with them carry out the task of saving the humanity and life on the planet. We can do it ourselves if you don’t want to. Just trade debt for life, by nature. I propose and summon you to Latin America to do so, to dialogue to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war. It is the hour of PEACE. Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world do it. War is just a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality. From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace, without social, economic and environmental justice. We are at war, too, with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.
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September 23, 2022
Finca Solana
Corozal Town