Gustavo Petro: I propose to end the war to defend life from climate crisis
Speech by President Gustavo Petro at the High-level Political Forum of the 78th UN General Assembly. teleSUR
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00:00 behalf of the General Assembly, I have the honor to welcome His Excellency Gustavo Petro
00:06 Uregu, President of the Republic of Colombia, and invite him to address the Assembly.
00:31 [Gustavo Petro Uregu] Thank you. [Gustavo Petro Uregu] Thank you. [Gustavo Petro Uregu] Thank you.
00:58 At this moment, the President of the United Nations Session, Denis Francis, is trying
01:06 to convene again and to put order on the halls of the 78th Session of the United Nations
01:12 General Assembly. As he previously called for a recess and for a moment, and now the
01:17 President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro Uregu, must address the forum. Let's listen.
01:23 [Gustavo Petro Uregu] Thank you. [Foreign Minister] Thank you. Antonio, Denis, my wife,
01:44 Veronica, and my youngest daughter, Veronica, here. I, a week ago, was in Santiago de Chile,
01:55 and I've made my journey to here from there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a homicidal
02:01 and bloody coup against President Salvador Allende. I then went through my own country
02:11 and a popular neighborhood of Medellin, where the mafia used to attract young people to
02:17 offer them the possibility of learning computer programming. I then arrived in Havana, an
02:27 unjustly blockaded country, where a president of my country suggested and achieved that
02:34 it be included in the list of terrorist-sponsoring countries, simply because it helped to make
02:41 peace in Colombia. And now I am here, ladies and gentlemen, to make my speech to you. Over
02:51 this year, since the last speech that I gave in the United Nations, we have only seen a
02:58 deepening of what the wealthy, meeting in Davos, call a poly-crisis. The war is continuing.
03:06 Hunger continues. The recession is increasing. And the climate crisis has shown its teeth
03:14 as never before, claiming thousands of lives and heating our lands and our seas like never
03:23 before. This has been a year where humanity has been losing and has unfailingly hastened
03:32 the era of extinction. All of these crises are, in fact, just one crisis, the crisis
03:39 of life. It seems that world leaders have become the enemies of life. The crisis of
03:49 life is being expressed in one devastating indicator. This began at the furthest corners
03:57 of the earth, far away from the remotest regions, a silent march of people from different cultures
04:07 who are intermingling on their way. Like an infinitely nuanced painting, the colours are
04:15 mixing together in an uncontainable march. A multitude of all the colours is moving along
04:22 the tracks, through the seas, through the jungles. It is making up a kind of work of
04:28 art on the canvas of the earth. A flow of tones, sounds, different clothes and cultures
04:37 in an amalgam which does not forget its beginnings. In an amalgam, in a great march from the south
04:44 to the north, this is the exodus of humanity which has begun. Today, there are tens of
04:52 millions. Tomorrow, according to experts, by 2070, the figure will have reached three
04:58 billion, fleeing from their beloved homes because these homes will be uninhabitable.
05:06 In my homeland, the country of beauty, Colombia, the country of an explosion of life, by 2070,
05:16 only deserts will remain. The people will go to the north, no longer attracted by the
05:23 mirage of wealth, but rather by something simpler, something more vital, water. Since
05:32 the beginnings, the millenary beginnings of humanity, people have gone to where water
05:40 is, to the north. Billions of people will defy armies and will change the earth to do
05:47 this. This exodus of the peoples to the north is an exact reflection of the dimension of
05:55 the failure of governments. This last year has been a time of defeat for governments,
06:03 a defeat for humanity. The exodus across the borders has increased. They have set the dogs
06:11 and the hounds on the immigrants. They have put people on horses to pursue them with whips
06:17 in their hands, with stocks and chains. They have built prisons. So much the hatred has
06:26 grown of the foreign, of the strange. These prisons have even been built at sea so that
06:35 these women and men cannot tread the earth of the white people who still believe themselves
06:41 to be the superior race and are nostalgic for this. And through their choices and elections,
06:47 they revive the leader who said so and who killed millions as a result. The exodus has
06:53 increased over this year, showing how much the crisis of life is advancing. But the minutes
07:02 are ticking on in defining life or death on our planet. And rather than halting this march
07:09 of time and talking about how to defend life for the future, thanks to greater knowledge
07:18 and expanding life to the universe, we are deciding instead to waste our time killing
07:24 one another. We are not thinking about how to expand life to the stars, but rather how
07:30 to end life on our own planet. We have devoted ourselves to war. We have been called to war.
07:42 Latin America has been called upon to produce war machines, men to go to the killing fields.
07:50 They're forgetting that our countries have been invaded several times by the very same
07:55 people who are now talking about combating invasions. They're forgetting that for oil,
08:01 Iraq was invaded, Syria and Libya. They're forgetting that the same reasons they used
08:08 to defend Zelensky are those very reasons which should be deployed to defend Palestine.
08:17 They forget that to meet the sustainable development goals, all wars must be brought to an end.
08:26 But they are helping to wage one war in particular, because world powers see this suiting themselves
08:34 in their gamesmanship, in their games of hunger, and they're forgetting to bring an end to
08:38 the other war, because for these powers, this did not suit them. What is the difference
08:45 between Ukraine and Palestine, I ask? Is it not time to bring an end to both wars, and
08:50 other wars too, and make the most of the short time we have to build paths to save life on
08:56 the planet? As President of Colombia, this country of beauty, of a group of humanity,
09:08 millions of workers, women and men from popular neighborhoods, indigenous people, Afro-descendants,
09:14 people from the fields, workers, young people of all colors, I'm the President these people
09:20 decided to elect in the majority, and I'm here to speak before you. And I propose bringing
09:25 an end to this war, so that we have time to save ourselves. I propose that the United
09:32 Nations should hold, as soon as possible, two peace conferences, one on Ukraine, the
09:40 other on Palestine. Not because there are no other wars in the world, as there are in
09:47 my country, but because this would guide the way to making peace in all regions of the
09:52 planet. Because both of these alone can bring an end to the hypocrisy as a political practice.
10:01 Because we could be sincere, a virtue without which we cannot be warriors for life itself.
10:10 The generation which today must decide and must act as soon as possible to overcome the
10:15 enormous hurricane which has been unleashed against life, from the dark but powerful forces
10:23 of greed, the hurricane of capital, which only looks to profit, and which has swallowed
10:30 up the planet and the very foundation of our existence. I propose bringing an end to war,
10:38 to defend life from the climate crisis, which is the mother of all crises. This summit has
10:46 been established to evaluate the targets of the sustainable development goals established
10:53 by the governments for 2013. It's easy to carry out an assessment. These human development
11:04 goals will not be achieved. We are far from reaching them. We have moved backwards. The
11:14 United Nations Human Development Objectives could more simply be called social and environmental
11:25 justice. Social justice will not be achieved for humanity by 2030, because what we have
11:36 sown is injustice in our planet. What has been created over these years is injustice.
11:45 The injustice of putting the vaccine against the deadly virus on the market, concentrating
11:54 it in rich countries. Latin America saw 30% of COVID deaths, although it makes up only
12:03 8% of the world population. Who said that health should be a business and not a right?
12:14 Millions of older people and others died because the vaccine was traded rather than being a
12:20 common good for humanity. They failed to deliver on their own promise to finance adaptation
12:26 to climate change. They do not have $100 billion to give to countries to defend themselves
12:33 from floods, storms and hurricanes, but they do have that money in a single day to allow
12:42 Russians and Ukrainians to kill one another. Now we no longer need $100 billion, we need
12:49 $3 trillion to overcome the climate crisis. And the clock is ticking. Ladies and gentlemen,
13:02 injustice has been sown. And cannabis growers and coca growers have been arrested rather
13:09 than tackling the solitude in which the youth of their own countries live. These countries
13:15 have the greatest economic and military power in the history of humanity. To combat this
13:21 solitude, they have moved on to the drugs of death, to fentanyl. They wanted a war against
13:28 the drugs of the rebellious youth who opposed the war in Vietnam, the marijuana and the
13:34 LSD of the hippies. And they ended up driving their society towards the drug of neoliberalism
13:41 and competition, the drug of the Manhattan yuppie, cocaine. And they imprisoned millions
13:50 of Africans and Latin Americans in cold private prisons. And a million Latin Americans were
13:57 killed. Democracies were destroyed in our America. But they never arrested the Manhattan
14:04 yuppie. And now they are facing the grand outcome of the prohibition of drugs, fentanyl,
14:12 which is not killing 4,000, but 100,000 young people every year in the United States. Ladies
14:19 and gentlemen, they sowed injustice. And the worst of these has been to condemn humanity
14:25 to war. So today, the balance of social justice across the world is so skewed. The problem
14:34 is that this was not an issue of socialists, of progressives. Rather, it was a matter where
14:43 the time left to the planet was flowing away. As president of the country of beauty, I propose
14:49 returning to a time of simplicity to recover the time lost. So, ending the war and reforming
14:59 the global financial system. From the peace conferences on Ukraine and Palestine, we should
15:06 come out able to build a reform that we have already discussed in the Amazon forest, where
15:13 the greatest river of the earth, which has crossed the greatest jungle of the earth,
15:18 reaches the sea. We had discussed this in Bredilia, and we went to Kenya to meet with
15:26 the brotherly peoples of Africa, where we came from at the time of one of the other
15:33 great injustices of power, slavery. And we went to Paris to see whether multitudes there
15:41 were still crying for liberty, equality, and fraternity. And we went to Washington to talk
15:48 to the president and see whether we in the north and the south of the Americas could
15:55 meet again, as we did in the past, over two centuries ago, where we met in history to
16:03 talk about liberty, equality, democracy, and republic. And let us talk in all possible
16:11 ways about getting to the root of the climate crisis and its solution. If fossil capitalism
16:18 has no financing, it will die. Its death throes will be hard, but this is necessary for there
16:27 to be humanity, nature, and life. The decarbonized capitalism will have to be financed, but we
16:37 know that green capital will only flow to places where there is profit. That is what
16:44 governs it. And its structure is a very narrow one to contain the decarbonization of the
16:51 entire world. Governments and powers who still believe that the climate crisis and that of
16:58 life can be overcome with cheap loans are mistaken. They are deluded to propose that
17:06 those countries of the earth which are already indebted are indebted as a result of disease
17:10 and greed, and that they can use more loans to overcome a problem that only the belching
17:17 chimneys of the north have produced. It is not possible to overcome the crisis of life,
17:25 this mega crisis, with more indebtedness. The financing of life, the flow of medicines
17:33 which must be leaving behind coal and oil under the earth, leaving it under the earth
17:40 in those very places where the true veins of the earth flow, as Roberto Cobarria, the
17:45 Ua indigenous native from Colombia, said over 30 years ago. As he said, extracting oil was
17:52 to remove the blood from the earth, and life would then die. The majority of the investment
18:00 to decarbonize the world's economy should come from public funds, the efforts of societies,
18:06 bringing together states so as to bring together humanity. Today they call this multilateralism,
18:15 governing the earth with the vision of democracy and not a vision of empire. Empires do not
18:23 save life, they merely unleash wars. If the mega crisis of life is to be resolved, it
18:32 will be through a democracy which achieves a global scale, a deeper democracy, which
18:38 will not fear interlinking states and societies and planning for the great Marshall Plan of
18:45 the revitalization of the planet. The market will help us somewhat, but we cannot ask for
18:53 solutions from a mechanism which has no humanity, and when it was this mechanism which produced
19:00 the very problem. Private funds can be used, but they will be limited by their own logic.
19:09 The force to do this will come from public funds, and these funds are currently weakened
19:15 by debt. The great battle of our generation is defending life for our children and grandchildren,
19:23 and this can only be fully financed by what is public, by what belongs to all of us. We
19:31 must liberate the public to save life. Many people may not like this, but if the voice
19:39 of the public, of the state, of humanity, of multilateralism is to be heard again, this
19:46 means the voice of change will be heard again, because in order to save life, this is fundamental.
19:54 Saving life requires an epoch of change, and it is urgent. Change and life are now synonymous.
20:03 Youth of all colours today, in order to live, must fly the flags of change, of transformation,
20:11 of a new humanity. It is democracy and not authoritarian regimes which is looking more
20:18 and more like the Nazis. It is global democracy, these plans, the power of those states who
20:27 are not tackling war, but are tackling and attacking the plans for life, these plans
20:35 to achieve the transition to a decarbonised economy and to finance it. The decarbonised
20:42 economy will, without a doubt, be a more humane and a more just economy. So, I, as President
20:50 of the country of beauty, propose a reform of the global financial system, of the IMF,
20:57 of the multilateral bank, and bringing an end to economic blockades and guiding funds
21:04 from private capital. If everybody's debt is reduced, paying off the creditors with
21:13 an IMF issuance of special drawing rights, there will be a decrease in the global public
21:21 debt and a real increase in budgets and public funds. In this way, we will be able to finance
21:29 the Marshall Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals, for the social and environmental justice
21:36 of the planet, the plan to overcome, through mitigation and adaptation, the climate crisis,
21:44 which is the crisis of life. This is reviving Keynes worldwide, after forgetting him. This
21:53 wise old man already said this, as did other wise people before him, and their words too
21:58 are forgotten, the words that they expressed from their deep ideas. What a beautiful perspective
22:05 in the midst of today's darkness and storms, a perspective which looks hopeful. The objective
22:14 of life and justice can be achieved by treading the path of global democracy and of returning
22:21 value to what is public, to what is common and shared, which can be reached by all. I
22:31 want my grandchildren, who are babies today, Luna, Victoria and Luca, and my daughter Antonella,
22:39 to be able to live far from the apocalypse and the era of extinction. I want them to
22:48 live in times where humanity was able to stop killing itself and killing the planet, and
22:56 through the very diversity of its cultures, managed to achieve understanding and to achieve
23:02 its mission, spreading the virus of life to the stars of the universe. Thank you very
23:09 much.
23:10 [Applause]