Read the full text of Gustavo Petro's speech at the UN.

Speech at the United Nations General Assembly – 20/9/2022

GUSTAVO PETRO URREGO

President of Colombia

I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There's 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 shades of green, flow not only abundant waters, but also torrents of blood. I come from a country of bloodied 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 routine decisions about wealth and profit?

Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?

My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon Rainforest, the Chocó Tropical Forest, the waters, the Andes mountain range, and the oceans.

In these jungles, planetary oxygen is emitted and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2-absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on Earth. They seek its destruction in every way: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, a sacred plant of the Incas.

Like a paradoxical crossroads. The jungle that one tries to save is, at the same time, being destroyed.

To destroy the coca plant, they use massive amounts of poison, glyphosate, which runs through the waterways; they arrest its producers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are murdered and two million African Americans in North America are imprisoned. 'Destroy the plant that kills,' they shout from the North, but the plant is just one more among the millions that perish when they set fire to the forest.

Destroying the rainforest, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by states and businesses. The outcry from scientists christening the forest as one of the great pillars of climate change is irrelevant. For the world's power structures, the forest and its inhabitants are blamed for the plague that torments them. Power relations are tormented by the addiction to money, to its perpetuation, to oil, to cocaine, and to harder drugs, in order to numb themselves even further.

Nothing is more hypocritical than the rhetoric about saving the forest.

The forest is burning, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it. The forest, the world's climate pillar, is disappearing along with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 is evaporating. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as vegetation to be extinguished. The space of the coca and the peasants who cultivate it, because they have nothing else to cultivate, is demonized. For you, my country is only of interest to you: to throw poisons into your forests, to send your men to jail and to throw your women into exclusion. You are not interested in the education of children, but in killing your forest and extracting coal and oil from its depths. The sponge that absorbs the poisons is useless; you prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.

We serve only as an excuse for the emptiness and loneliness of their own society, which leads them to live amidst bubbles of drugs. We hide their problems, which they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the forest, on its plants, on its people.

While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites persecute plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to appease another vice: the vice of consumption, of power, of money.

What is more poisonous to humanity: cocaine, coal, or oil? The ruling power has decreed that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even though it only causes deaths from overdoses and the mixtures resulting from its established clandestine existence. But, on the other hand, coal and oil must be protected, even though their use could extinguish all of humanity. These are the workings of world power, the workings of injustice, the workings of irrationality, because world power has become irrational.

They see in the exuberance of the forest, in its vitality, lust, sin; the origin of the guilt and sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness amidst societies devoid of affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, but placing the blame on the plant, on the man who cultivates it, on the liberating secrets of the forest. According to the irrational power of the world, the blame does not lie with the market that cuts off existence; the blame lies with the forest and those who inhabit it.

Bank accounts have become limitless; centuries will not be enough to spend all the money hoarded by the world's most powerful. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and possessions has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race into which humanity has transformed itself. The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate sprayed on the forests. The culprit is not the forest. The culprit is its society, educated in infinite consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness, which, in fact, allows the pockets of power to fill with money.

The culprit behind drug addiction is not the forest, but the irrationality of its global power.

Bring some reason to your power. Turn the lights of the century back on.

The war on drugs has already lasted 40 years; if we don't correct course and this war lasts another 40 years, the United States will see 2.800.000 young people die from fentanyl overdose(*), which is not produced in our Latin America. They will see millions of African Americans imprisoned in their private prisons. The African prisoner will become a business for prison corporations; another million 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 Athens of Western Europe.

By hiding the truth, they will watch the forest and democracies die.

The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed.

Deadly consumption increased, from mild drugs to stronger ones; there was a genocide on my continent and in my country, millions of people were condemned to prison; to hide their own social guilt, they blamed the forest and its plants. They emptied the discourse and the policies.

From here, from my wounded Latin America, I demand an end to the irrational war on drugs. Reducing drug use doesn't require wars; it requires all of us working together to build a better society: a more supportive, more loving society, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and new forms of slavery. Do you want fewer drugs? Think about less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.

Do not let your poisons taint the beauty of my homeland. Help us, without hypocrisy, to save the Amazon rainforest, to save the lives of humanity on this planet.

You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climate models, they said that the end of the human species is approaching, that its time is no longer millennia, or even centuries. Science sounded the alarm, but we stopped listening. War served as an excuse not to take the necessary measures.

When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was essential to deposit money into funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as quickly as possible, one war after another and another were invented. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They invaded the name of oil and gas.

In the 21st century, they discovered the worst of their vices: addiction to money and oil.

Wars served as an excuse for inaction against the climate crisis. Wars showed them how dependent they are on what will end the human race.

If you see that people are hungry and thirsty and are migrating by the millions to the north, where the water is; then you lock them up, build walls, use machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings; you quintuple the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and concentration camps; you reproduce on a planetary scale what happened in 1933. The great triumph of the attack on reason.

Don't you see that the solution to the great exodus back to their countries is to make the rivers fill with water and the fields become full of nutrients?

Climate disaster is filling us with viruses that swarm and kill us; yet 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. Humanity's Frankenstein lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason, kneeling human rationality to greed.

Why wage war when what we need is to save the human race? What good are NATO and empires if what's coming is the end of intelligence?

The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people, and listen carefully, this is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital. The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of relating to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more, produces climate disasters. They articulated the logic of expanded accumulation, the energy engines of coal and oil, and unleashed the hurricane: the most profound and deadly chemical change in the atmosphere. Now, in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.

From the lands of forest and beauty, where they decided to turn an Amazonian rainforest plant into an enemy, extradite and imprison its producers, I invite you to stop the war, and stop the climate disaster.

Here, in this Amazon rainforest, lies a failure of humanity. Behind the fires that burn it, after its poisoning, lies a complete and civilizational failure of humanity.

Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, lies the true addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit, and to money. This is the enormous deadly machine that could extinguish humanity.

As president of one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and one of the most bloodied and violated, I propose that you end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace.

I call upon all of Latin America for this purpose. I call upon the voice of Latin America to unite in defeating the irrationality that martyrs our bodies.

I call upon you to save the Amazon rainforest in its entirety with the resources that can be allocated worldwide for life. If you lack the capacity to fund the revitalization of the forests, if allocating money to weapons is more important than allocating it to life, then reduce the external debt to free up our own budgetary space, and with it, we can accomplish the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do this if you don't want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature.

I propose and call upon Latin America to do this: to engage in dialogue to end the war. Do not pressure us into going to the battlefields. It is time for PEACE. Let the Slavic peoples speak to one another, let the peoples of the world do the same. War is merely a trap that brings the end times closer in the great orgy of irrationality.

From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace.

Only through peace can we save life on this earth. 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.

(*)Translator's Note: Fentanyl is considered the strongest opioid available for medical use in humans, with approximately 100 times the potency of morphine.

>>> Read more: At the UN, the Colombian president calls for Latin America to unite against the war on drugs.