Mr. President, allow me to extend you the warmest and
most heartfelt greeting of the people and the
Government of Honduras. I would also extend this
greeting to all nations and peoples represented here. I
congratulate you, Sir, a distinguished representative of
the Republic of Nicaragua who today is leading the
Assembly. Your prestige as a man of peace and
harmony and as a builder of dreams and utopias has
been recognized throughout the world through the
numerous prizes you have received, which honour the
peoples of Central America.
Honduras currently holds the presidency pro
tempore of the Central American Integration System,
and I would like to recognize the work of the United
Nations and use this opportunity also to recognize the
determination of the Central American Presidents to
bring about a process of Central American integration.
As was recognized by the European Commission, the
region of the world that is unifying the most and
becoming the most integrated is Central America —
after Europe, of course. That is part of an important
process, because we are addressing on areas and
sectors that are important for our society.
Francisco Morazán was a martyr who gave his
life for the cause of Central American union and for
liberal policies, opposing the enemies of independence
and freedom. The peoples of Central America and of
Honduras continue to fight for these causes. We
continue to fight for unity as we seek to establish
economic independence. In recent years, Honduras has
achieved a sustainable growth rate of between 6 and
7 per cent, and we have been able to reduce poverty
and have recognized the international and national
importance of protecting the environment. Honduras
has become a tourist destination in Central America,
because of the beauty of its main Caribbean Bay
Islands, such as Guanaja, Utila and Roatán.
However, today, all of those advances in our
economy and in the fight against poverty are being put
in jeopardy by the crisis and the international scale of
the financial fraud that has been brought about by the
big multinationals in the world. The serious events that
today have dragged us into a food and energy crisis
with high fuel prices, and the collapse of the financial
systems, particularly here in the United States of
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America, have shown that what I and others Presidents
are saying today are historic and irrefutable truths.
For example, in our countries, particularly in
Honduras, poverty and inequality are continuing to
grow more marked in our societies. The State continues
to become weaker through privatizations and capital is
concentrated in a few firms and a few hands, lessening
capacity to produce and generate development for our
people. In recent years, the unequal distribution of
wealth and income has become ever more entrenched.
In Honduras, less than 1 per cent of the population
possesses 70 per cent of the national wealth. Barely
10 families with links to international capital control
the main economic activities of the country, naturally
impoverishing the rest of the population.
Over the last two centuries, our peoples and our
region have resisted with heroism, dignity and stoicism
the onslaught of the cruel system that governs us. Pope
John Paul II himself came to call that capitalistic
system savage, an immoral mercantile system that
exploits men and women and turns them into mere
commodities and numbers. The merciless and demonic
laws of the invincible market only satisfy the wealth
and power of the few, to the detriment of the great
majority of our societies. They believe themselves
infallible gods. They are like a sinister Proteus that
plays cat and mouse with people. They act like Saturn,
the Greek god who devoured his children out of fear
that they would dethrone him. However, today, with
that logic of the law of the market, his sons are
devouring their creator in the very cradle of capitalism,
in the great centre of Wall Street or the other hubs of
speculative capital in the world.
To give an example, the international trafficking
of drugs, arms and people are other scourges that
prevent us developing peoples from achieving the
economic freedom and independence to which our
nations aspire. The submission of our poor countries to
the economic choices of international capital is brutal
and surprising. We can say that capitalism is devouring
human beings in most parts of the world, and
paradoxically it is now also devouring the very creators
of that system. Here I shall mention two particularly
salient examples. In Honduras, over the last 20 years,
many small coffee producers have succeeded in
increasing their exports from $200 million to almost
$600 million. That involved 20 years of hard work.
However, in the last 12 months, in barely a year, with
the doubling of the prices of energy, oil, food, wheat
and the main staples that we consume, we are now
losing what we achieved in that period of hard work.
Another example is what has happened here to
the mandate of the United Nations. In 2000, this
Organization agreed that poverty should be reduced by
at least 50 per cent in 15 years, which we know is not
coming about. The goal of reducing poverty and the
contributions that the international community pledged
to the developing world are not being translated into
reality. In contrast, by way of giving an example, for
each dollar that the international community
contributes to cooperation, it allocates 10 dollars to the
arms race.
Another quite fantastic example to give today is
what is happening with the bankruptcy of the big
investment banks. Now people are racing to provide
funds to those big banks. Logically, if we were to
provide them with what is being proposed today to
save those banking institutions that have created that
speculative capital — a sum of $700 billion — with
just a third of that amount we could reduce and
immediately put an end to poverty in Africa, Asia or
Latin America. That system is the true present-day
King Midas, who tried to convert everything into gold
and profit for one particular sector. We shall never be
free under that system, and we know that we must not
accept that condition of neo-slavery and
neocolonialism through which, by its domination, it
bends us to its purposes.
The question for us all is can that difficult
situation being experienced today, particularly by the
less developed countries, be saved. The answer is yes,
we can save ourselves from that crisis. We can respond.
First, the State must act, the State must operate again in
terms of social commitment. Capital must be used so
that it serves to build a genuinely fair society. The aim
should not be to destroy the market but simply to
construct a social market economy. Capital should
exist, but with limits. Defining the limits of capitalism
is important to put an end to its primitive laws of the
jungle. The aim is not to eliminate entrepreneurship
and the free market, but to check and regulate the
abuses and to humanize and sensitize those who are in
the driving seat.
We must support a genuine democratic system,
not only in international bodies but also internally
within our countries. We must reform false democracy,
which uses different political means to legitimize that
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system of exploitation and injustice. It is a false
democracy, in which men and women are seen merely
as voters, as useful instruments employed only to
distribute power, whose consciences are manipulated
by the highest bidder in a political comedy in which
those who possess wealth impose their mercantile
irrationality on the larger group of those who are
excluded from and marginalized by the system. We
must reform that system, improve it and strengthen it
so as to convert it into a genuine democracy. It is by
the logic of political democracies that Governments are
controlled and States manipulated, basic services are
privatized and the whole of society is indoctrinated
with an ideology of gain, egoism and individualism.
Imperialism as a system of domination of
countries and of trade must disappear from the face of
the Earth. The twenty-first century, and the peoples of
the twenty-first century, should not have to pay for the
excesses and brutality of the twentieth century.
We agree that property must exist, as it has a
social function. Since the beginning of social
organization in the world, property has always been
granted within the framework of collective ownership.
There must be the authority to intervene in speculative
markets, as is happening now in the United States.
Traders and their spokespeople do not have the right to
direct society. The strategic areas of the economy must
be at the service of the State and under its control to
ensure that society never finds itself without food or
medicine and that consumers are not robbed. Profits
produced by work, wealth and capital should be better
distributed in our societies among the real owners —
workers, producers, capitalists, consumers and the
State — in order to attain a common good.
The major transnational companies that produce
medicines and chemical products should make
available to developing countries the patents for
technological discoveries that can improve living
conditions for our citizens. This is a time for human
solidarity.
We should end unfair competition in markets by
eliminating subsidies in industrialized countries and
removing tariff and non-tariff barriers. That would be a
good message of the international community, a good
intention at this time of crisis, for those peoples that
were once their colonies, a message that we are no
longer looked upon as mere game reserves but as
brothers in humanity.
I am sure that the peoples of the world are able to
come together to provide alternatives to a crude system
that kills and destroys everything that does not adapt to
its unmerciful laws.
Developed countries have a responsibility
towards the peoples. Members know that very well.
This afternoon we want to say, from this United
Nations rostrum, that we are very grateful to the
developed world, the industrialized world, for their
cooperation with us at certain times. However, our
peoples and our countries do not want donations. We
have not come here to beg.
What we want is to be treated with equality and
respect, and the right to opportunities and to
participate. We do not want to be affected by the
asymmetries in the economies and differences in
developed countries. We do not want to have models
imposed on us, models that only impoverish our
nations. We do not want to be given lessons about how
to manage our economies. We want to be given
examples of solidarity and responsibility in the face of
the major problems of nations, examples of how to
distinguish between matters of importance to human
beings and matters that are simply material. To
developed countries we say that if they offer us aid, do
not attach conditions to our acceptance of it. Do not
insist that we accept a neoliberal model that is
suffocating and exploiting our communities.
We cannot continue to measure development of
countries by the profits of large companies. We must
measure development by the access of young people to
education and jobs, of children to food, of mothers to
hospitals, of those who are ill to treatment, and of the
undernourished to food.
We say to the countries of the Group of Eight
(G8), with all due respect, that that very important
organization should expand its membership to include
countries that represent the five continents, to include
countries of the Americas, such as Mexico, Brazil,
Bolivia or Cuba, or, from other areas, India. The G8
should increase its capacity for dialogue with, for
example, Central America or the South American
Common Market (MERCOSUR), where there are so
many societies that could contribute with ideas, for
ideas are sometimes worth more than money.
The countries that cooperate should respect
national systems and not impose their own aid
reception mechanisms on us. They should respect the
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national priorities and systems that each country has
developed in its programmes, the planning of
Governments legitimately elected by the people.
Likewise, with all due respect to the European
countries and to the United States of America, we wish
to ask them to consider — as a gesture of goodwill and
in light of the problems that we ourselves are suffering
as a result of the financial imbalances that those
countries caused — the rights of immigrants who are
already on their territories. I would also like to recall
that the peoples living in the lands of America and
Europe were themselves once immigrants in those
lands.
What does it cost to reunite migrant families and
to begin to deal with their documentation, instead of
deporting them? To immigrate is a human right, not a
crime, and we should consider it in the context of
respect for society. All of us want peace and harmony,
and this is the best means of obtaining them.
The world is also concerned with the enlargement
of the Security Council. Like other presidents who
have spoken about this matter from this podium over
the decades, we believe that there should be
democratization at the very top of the United Nations,
and the example should begin at home. That way we
could discuss the real problems of humanity and find
solutions.
We therefore need to establish a new pedagogy, a
new way of education of our peoples, our children and
future generations. We must cultivate, as is logical,
genuine freedom for our nations, freedom of the press,
freedom of movement, an honest freedom that gives
the people the opportunity to know the truth about their
problems without lies and manipulation.
The new manner of teaching that we are
proposing to the General Assembly today could be
promoted through the development programmes of the
United Nations. We must begin to teach the value of
solidarity among human beings, among countries and
among the various organizations represented here. That
teaching should demonstrate in a practical way that the
centre of the world is not material possessions or
money; the centre of the world should always be the
human being — men and women, young people,
children, the elderly, those beings with a soul and who
are made in the image of the Creator of the universe.
In conclusion, I wish to take a moment to read a
poem entitled, “Gold”, by the Honduran poet and
writer Alfonso Guillén Zelaya, who described well
through poetry the events we have addressed in the
Assembly.
“Gold killed in men the native communion;
It divided the Earth and corrupted affection.
Before that, hunger did not exist.
Fruit grew in all places freely before this,
Waters, hunting, the plains were free.
As there were no owners, there were never thieves.
Life was one of peace, of love and of gentleness.
People were good, like blessings.
But, Lord of the gifts,
Your gifts are gone.
We are now condemned to live without fortune,
Everything that we have made,
Our own clothing, with the gold of the stars and the
silver of the moon.”
This is the Christian moral; it is the moral of the
message today, tomorrow and forever, that we must
accept the fact that this world is extremely materialistic
and not very spiritual. It was the message offered when
a tycoon approached the Master of Galilee and asked,
Lord, how do I save myself? He replied: leave your
possessions and follow me.
I would like to end with those thoughts on liberty,
which is what our societies most need today. Let us
ensure that the liberty advocated by our forefathers —
Martí, Bolívar and Morazán — transforms the destiny
of globalization so that we convert it into a
globalization of solidarity, of justice and of harmony
among the peoples. We must regain trust in the
collective so that we can return to trusting in reason
and say to the minority that they cannot be the reason
for the State simply because of what they own. That
alienating argument is unsustainable for the peoples of
the world.
I fervently appeal this afternoon for us to secure
votes for the freedom and peace of all peoples and
nations of the Earth, for the principles expressed and
ratified today in the sixty-third session of the General
Assembly, because I firmly believe that a new world,
another world, a better world is still possible. We have
united to defend important matters of other countries.
We have united to defend the positions of President
Evo Morales in Bolivia so that a real social democracy
can be established, as he has advocated. Based on those
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principles, we have signed the Bolivarian Alternative
for the Americas — ALBA — and, based on those
principles, we hope that the international community
will also provide the international solidarity needed by
Taiwan, which is asking for that solidarity.
We ask that God’s blessing for you all and for
your families and your nations become a reality today,
tomorrow and forevermore.