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Remarks by Colombian president, Gustavo Petro

FeaturesRemarks by Colombian president, Gustavo Petro

Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you the following remarks by the President of the Republic of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, before the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C. on April 19, 2023.

President of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS), Washington Abdala. You combine those two names, several human currents of the planet. Secretary General of the American States (OAS), Luis Eduardo Almagro. Assistant Secretary of the Organization of American States, Néstor Méndez. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Colombia, Álvaro Leyva Durán. Permanent Ambassadors to the Organization of American States (OAS). Officials of the National Government of Colombia, present here. Colombian and international media. Greetings to all the people who are with us today.

To our Ambassador to the United States of America, Luis Gilberto Murillo. To the Ambassador of Colombia to the Organization of American States (OAS) and both colleagues, Luis Ernesto Vargas. To the President of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia, Roy Leonardo Barreras. Speaker of the House of Representatives, David Racero. Chief of the Presidential Office, Laura Camila Sarabia, who is the person, one of the youngest here, the one with the most leadership in my country, in the Cabinet:

Well, here yesterday examining social networks, which now touches almost that, on a daily basis, a news item appeared from the International Energy Agency, which is the main energy organization in the world today, which stipulated how Latin America had become a deeply strategic space for the transformation of the world towards the decarbonized economy and clean energies. I looked at it from a perspective, the minerals that exist in Latin America. A somewhat traditional optic, almost that for more than five centuries we have been looked at alone, only for minerals. Formerly, those who generated wealth or were believed to be the generation of wealth, gold, silver, contemporaneously by fossils, which are precisely those that, in use through the accumulation of capital from profit, which is the engine of the contemporary economy, are about to extinguish humanity—oil, coal and gas. And now, precisely because of the minerals that are needed, even more than before, to build the energy transition, the path of clean energies. Copper, lithium, and so on. Here are the countries that have the highest global production and the highest percentage of extraction of these minerals, such as copper, such as lithium and others, twelve in total. But that, if we join, if we articulate another fact, it would be founded in these times. And we not only have the minerals that are needed for the energy transition, the path of clean energy, copper, lithium, etc. Here are the countries that have the highest global production and the highest percentage of extraction of these minerals, such as copper, such as lithium and others, twelve in total. That is to say, again, as in a third phase, as in a permanent and ascending cycle, Latin America once again has the minerals that the world needs.

From that perspective, undoubtedly, we are strategic if we join the lithium countries, the copper countries, the zinc countries, the nickel countries, which are part of these minerals absolutely necessary today. And if we came together we would feel what power means in a geopolitics that is changing across the planet. Not only should we look at ourselves from the perspective of minerals—as we have always been looked at and have looked at ourselves—extraction as the central axis of an economic activity that has little knowledge; that little work generates; that basically leaves us vulnerable, as we have been until now, but that if we put it together, if we articulate another fundamental fact in these times, is that we not only have the minerals that are needed for the energy transition, but we have the same energies that the planet allows to be usable in a renewed way to make clean energies: We have the water, the sun, the wind.

The Indians had discovered this some time ago. Water, sun and wind today are the fundamental sources for the generation of clean energies that are absolutely essential if we want life to continue on the planet in the coming decades, because we can no longer say centuries. The tipping points are about to be surpassed, the tipping points that do not allow life on this planet, including that of the human species. And here in Latin America, we have these two wings with which we can fly: minerals and energy sources, and too much. We use them or we don’t. We remain in the old extractivist economy, in fossil capital, longing for a development that will no longer come that way, or we put ourselves in the new terrain of what decarbonized economies, new production relations, the new society, the new power in the world mean. What is Latin America’s role in this new power? It is an approach that I have been discussing, speaking in all the scenarios where we find ourselves, the Ibero-American Forum, CELAC, the COP, the routine event of the United Nations and that I now leave today for your reflection and debate.

Of course, not only of economics can we speak, not only of the new possibilities, that schools of Latin American economic thought, such as the old ECLAC; today we should rebuild, or strengthen or create, because this is the era of Latin America if we want it. It is in the decarbonized economy where Latin America can be; it is in life where Latin America can be. Not for nothing did we put as a slogan the government and the electoral campaign that led me to this Government, that we can be a world power of life, it is for this and we cannot do it alone. Nor can we do it from authoritarianism, from dictatorships. The OAS is part of an effort, perhaps, very partial; perhaps with many limits to the construction of a democratic project in America. Not only in its origin, perhaps in the 70s, at the beginning, the liberals, mostly men in general of that time, machismo swarmed and still does. They built an agreement, an American pact in the sense that we give to the word American; a pact of the Americas, a pact that I call democratic, year ‘68, ‘69, ‘70, in ‘72 the Democratic Charter was ratified in Colombia, a Charter that, if you read it, and I recommend reading it permanently, is basically a liberal charter, a bill of individual rights, which was what was considered a priority at that time. They believed at that time that this was the response to the Cuban socialist revolution. Paradox of history; that Charter is built that today is the basis of the Inter-American System of Human Rights, to which, outside of my people, I owe my presidency, because someone sat here on behalf of my country.

A few years after, he took away my political rights almost for life as an administrative, not judicial, official. A fascist. And it even destroyed the possibility of political change in Colombia. He could not do it because of a decision, a ruling, a sentence that said: no administrative official, only one who is a criminal judge, can, and through the sentence, take away the political rights of any citizen of the Americas. That is precisely what the Democratic Pact, the Charter, said. What all the States present here ratified in different years, and that is part of the Colombian case of our Constitution and that of many of you. The Charter of a democratic project for Colombia, for Peru, for Venezuela, for Uruguay, for any of our countries, the Democratic Project for the Americas. What happened to that Charter? What happened to that liberal effort, in the broadest sense of the word? To this effort of all the countries of our continent to find a democratic path in our development. Almost two years did not pass, three, and it was bloodied. The Charter was bloodied in Chile. It was silenced, literally ceased to exist in Latin American history. Two paths opened almost immediately, which were not those of liberal rights, which was not exactly the democratic project, the path that was assumed in the Southern Cone of the military dictatorships. The path of torture, of disappearance, of destruction, of the annihilation of the human being of the public possibility. The road that destroyed and slammed the door with tanks, with cannon shots and bombings, with prisons and bars and with blood and torture, the democratic project that the liberals believed could be promoted throughout the Americas. And on the other hand we also responded – and I, personally – with the armed insurgency, with the revolutionary wars, with the revolutions: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Honduras, and other countries. We opened up to 30 years that, I would say, of loneliness. Thirty years of solitude that left millions of exiles in Europe, in the United States, in the corners of the earth. Thirty years of solitude that separated us as brother peoples, that left us wounds and scars that even then, at least in Colombia, are not erased. That led us to arms and violence from the State or against the State; that led us to societies of fear, of panic, of terror, of what would happen at four or five in the morning, if a truck was heard at the door. That led us to think that democracy was a simple illusion. That this project and that Charter that most Latin Americans did not read until now did not exist; that there was no democratic possibility for Latin America, that our destiny was to confront ourselves even with weapons, as many peoples in other parts of the world face today.

And those 30 years of solitude passed and a spring appeared as always, after the storms: flowers here, flowers there, popular decisions, mistakes, searches, freedom reborn between the cracks: freedom and democracy. A democracy that is not the same as the European one, that is not exactly the same as the North American one, that is not properly Western, because we are crossed by the cultures and winds of the diversity of the humanity of the world. Because we are that: a diverse wealth, where we cross between surnames, President, and, above all between blood, the various corners of the planet in this corner, also, of the planet we call the Americas. And so it was, because being the world of today for us, after dictatorships and after wars, being built through the word peace, the word social justice and the word democracy. And the cartica of the 70s revived and we now in the positions we have from our towns can either break it again or strengthen it. The Democratic Charter, that of liberal individual rights, which speaks of free expression and which speaks of the secret ballot, which speaks of political rights, but we can also enrich it and I propose them. This world today is not exclusively of liberal rights, the Colombian constitutional effort and many other Latin Americans seek the expansion of rights beyond the limit of the individual without ignoring them. It does not deny liberalism, it picks it up, enriches it and projects it into other spheres of society. Now we talk about the right to women, the right to equality of women, women in the plural. Gender equality. At that time there was no talk about it, it is not in the Democratic Charter. At this time we talk about the rights of nature, because we have realized that, as the ancestral indigenous people said, if there is no balance with nature we cease to exist.

Therefore, that nature to the other, to the others, the afterlife has rights that have been consigned here and there and in some rulings begin to appear, the right of the river, the right of the animal, the right of life without which the human species cannot exist. The climate crisis today demands that we can give rights to nature, where are they in our Democratic Charter? Social rights, the rights of working people, the rights of indigenous people to have their culture, their autonomy, their own ancestral freedom to do in this contemporary world, where are those rights in the Democratic Charter?  How many sessions have been held to remake the Democratic Charter, not to limit it further, because, in my opinion, the project of democracy in the Americas is not to cut back on the Charter of the 70s, it is to expand it towards the contemporary rights that some technicians today call the fourth generation, towards a more lively democracy, richer than we find already in Western Europe or in the United States of the North, which is a struggle of all humanity to bring it as a democracy much deeper than the old representative and liberal democracy, without denying it. Latin America can be the world spokesman of this new democratic project, undoubtedly revolutionary, when today they want to flood us with the times of the extinction of humanity in years of war, in years of blood, in years of poverty, in years of hunger, in years of illness, in years of crisis, as they said in Davos (Switzerland) the police—crisis that is the crisis of the existence of human civilization when it begins to perceive that the times of extinction are just around the corner if we walk blindly there.

I propose to remake the Democratic Charter and on the way to remaking the Democratic Charter settle our accounts. Undoubtedly, not only was I the victim of a breach of that Charter, when my political rights were taken away, which I recovered thanks to a sentence; that is why I believe in that system, among other things. There have been thousands, and thousands of Latin Americans, and the criticism is not to one side, without looking the other way, or organizing and destroying the very content of what a democratic pact means. Of course, if I am interested, and I am fighting, that Venezuela re-enter the inter-American human rights system, of course we have talked with Cuba, which was never there, which built even against the projects that were being built in Cuban society. But we do not look at Peru, so there is no president imprisoned without a judicial sentence, without his political rights. That is, contrary to the democratic charter. Our legal system, not only ours, those there, those of the neighbors, are not yet cut in such a way, or built in such a way that they contradict the democratic charter, that elected presidents can be thrown out because they do, because they do not have the majority in Congress, when they are elected by the people. The democratic charter says that only a judicial sentence, from a criminal judge, takes away political rights. So because they are taking away political rights from the people, if there is no judicial sentence, we do not see it, we did not see it in Honduras, we did not see it in Paraguay, we did not see it in Brazil, we are not seeing it now in Peru. It could not happen now in Colombia or in any other country of any one present here. We are not violating the democratic pact of the Americas.

Instead of going towards a broader charter of law, of deepening democracy, towards a democratic project that makes Latin America the great world beacon of reason and freedom. We are not going backwards, towards retreating into history so that again the tanks fire, and the prisons are filled, and the humble people fall bloodied in the streets, simply for asking for the right to exist, and the right to have rights. I invite reflection, I invite us to confront each other here, I invite us to meet again here on the democratic path. Because if we get together, if we gather and articulate the economic possibilities of the new economy it is absolutely essential to build, in the short term, the decarbonized economy, singing towards life, intensely using clean and renewable energies, and what Latin America could be. That by bringing together nature, minerals, winds, sun and water they could find the way to their own industrialization, and therefore their own prosperity. If that is so from the economic field, how would we be if we articulated ourselves to a profound democratic project, of which we have in reality some first steps settled, such as the one expressed in the old liberal democratic charter, if we deepened it, if democracy were the profound project of Latin America. To join that of the political world, with that economic world that opens, I believe that it opens up the great path of which Allende spoke, among other things: the great path of transformations, the great path of the new role that cultures, which as cosmic bloods we could say, as Vasconcelos said, come together in this corner of the planet, could be the path. Precisely to prove that it is possible, that it is real to be a world power of life.

Thank you. Very kind for listening to me.

[email protected]
April 30, 2023
Finca Solana
Corozal Town

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