[In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president
highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the
environment]
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COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT GUSTAVO PETRO CALLS FOR AN END TO THE WAR ON
DRUGS IN HISTORIC UN ADDRESS  
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September 20, 2022
Peoples Dispatch
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_ In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president
highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the
environment _

Gustavo Petro addressed the UN General Assembly on September 20,
2022., Photo: UN

 

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian
President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech
sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro
did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their
role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of
the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our
jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You
are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the
jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that
absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw
more poisons into the atmosphere.”

This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was
inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by
hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support to
his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring
the wellbeing of the Colombian people.

Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to
the United Nations General Assembly:

_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, in the lands…I come from the land
of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of
all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the
torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty._

_My country is not only beautiful, it is also violent._

_How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of
life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of
breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for
drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is
leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?_

_My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the
ChocóWar  jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the
oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and
atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among
millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any
cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca
plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical
crossroads._

_The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To
destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that
runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them.
For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin
Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in
North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the
North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when
they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the
Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The
cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great
climatic pillars is unimportant._

_For the world’s power relations, 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 themselves, to oil,
to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize
themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to
save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make
war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the
world, disappears with all its life._

_The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior
forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed
to be extinguished._

_Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to
grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray
poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in
exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but
in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails.
The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw
more poisons into the atmosphere._

_We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own
society that leads 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, on its plants, on its people. While they
let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase 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, of power, of money._

_What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? The
dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be
pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even
more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil
must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of
humanity._

_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 to 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 back on existence, it is the fault of the
jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become
unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not
even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of
existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled
with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another
face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in
the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed
humanity._

_The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed]
on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame._

_The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the
stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the
pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is
not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to
give some reason to your 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 from fentanyl, which is not
produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans
imprisoned in its private jails._

_The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a
million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our
green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will
die in my America as well as 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. There has been an
increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones,
genocide has taken place in my continent and in my country, millions
of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social
guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled
speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my
wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs.
To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this we need all
of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more
affectionate, where the intensity of life saves from addictions and
new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more
love. Think about a rational exercise of power._

_Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, 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 of
millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing
and we stopped listening to it._

_The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures.
When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when
it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when
it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible,
they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also
Iraq, 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 them as an excuse not to act against the climate
crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill
the human species._

_If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst
and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the
water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns,
shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you
reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created
the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a
planetary scale 1933._

_The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the
solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return
to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The
climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do
business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You
propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has
created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and
greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason.
Kneeling human rationality to greed._

_What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species?
What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of
intelligence? The climate 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 the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming
together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for
some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied
the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and
oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical
change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded
accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death._

_From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make
an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its
growers, I invite you to stop the war, and to stop the climate
disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of
humanity._

_Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an
integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to
cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the
real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to
irrational power, to profit and money. This is the enormous deadly
machinery that can extinguish humanity._

_I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries
on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on
drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin
America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite
to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to
save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be
allocated worldwide to life._

_If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the
revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to
weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own
budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity
and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just
exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin
America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure
us to align ourselves in the fields of war._

_It is time for PEACE._

_Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the
world talk to each other. War is only 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 also
at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be
no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social
peace._

* Colombia
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* war on drugs
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* Climate Change
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* Amazon Rainforest
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* peace
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