Petro at the UN: ‘War on drugs and climate crisis has failed’

The president of Colombia, Gustav Petro, delivered, this Tuesday, September 20, his first speech as president before the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN).

Among the highlights of his statement was that the war on drugs and climate change has failed and called on the international community to end this violence.

(See: Petition made by Colombia to a US senator on the fight against drugs).

Petro began his speech by making a parallelism between the beauty of the country and the pouring of poisons on the jungles product of “condemn” the coca plant, for what he called “hypocrite” the global discourse for “save the jungle”.

“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”, said the president.

The president criticized the burning of the forest for promote consumerism in first world societies.

(See: Education is the basis of productive transformation: Petro at the UN).

“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”, he mentioned.

He warned that the drug war has failed and that, if the course is not diverted, it will be another 40 years of violence: “The United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of fentanyl overdoses and Afro-Americans will be imprisoned in their private prisons. One million more Latin Americans will be murdered”.

“The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has
failed”, sentenced the president.

(See: Duque, new president of the Concordia Initiative for the Amazon).

In this sense, he demanded from Latin America one voice united to ask the world to “end this irrational war on drugs” and asked for help to “save without hypocrisy” the Amazon jungle for “the life of humanity on the planet.”

“With mathematics and climatological models they said that the end of the
human species, 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, Libya and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas”, referred President Petro.

(See: How viable is it to implement Petro’s pension proposal?).

And he was not alone in the Latin region, he also proposed to the rest of the countries “toend the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace”.

In this first speech, the Colombian president urged the first world countries to reduce the foreign debt of Latin American countries for financiate “homework” to save humanity and life on the planet.

(See: What they think in the US of the first Petro-Maduro rapprochements).

“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. Only change debt for life, for nature“, said.

He ended by commenting that the war “is just a trap” that “brings the end of time closer” in a “great orgy of irrationality.” He mentioned that it is “peace time” and summoned the Slavic peoples (Russia and Ukraine) to talk to each other to solve the war conflict.

(See: Tax collection grew 40% during the first month of the Petro government).

“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”, President Gustavo Petro concluded.