I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth. There is an explosion of life there — thousands of multicoloured species in the seas, skies and lands. I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. Water cascades down the lush green mountains and valleys — but so do torrents of blood. I come from a country of blood-soaked beauty.
My country is both beautiful and violent. How can beauty co-exist with death? How can the biodiversity of life flourish alongside the dance of death and horror? Who is to blame for breaking the spell with terror? Who or what is responsible for burying our daily lives in routine decisions about wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and a people?
My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon forest, the Choco Forest, the waters, the Andes Mountain range and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is generated and atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) is absorbed. One of those C02-absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on Earth. Its destruction is being sought at any cost — it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas.
As if at a paradoxical crossroads, the forest we are trying to save is at the same time being destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they throw vast quantities of poisons and glyphosate into the water, they arrest the growers and imprison them. People who grow the coca plant are arrested and imprisoned. One million Latin Americans have been killed, and 2 million African- Americans are imprisoned in North America for destroying or possessing the coca leaf.
“Destroy the plant that kills”, they shout from the North, but the plant is only one of the millions that perish when they set the jungle on fire. Destroying the forest, the Amazon, has become the watchword of States and businesses. Never mind the scientists’ warning that the rainforest is one of the great pillars of the climate. For the global power networks, the forest and its inhabitants are to blame for the problems that beset them. The global power networks are at the mercy of their addiction to money, remaining in power, oil, cocaine and the hardest drugs available to numb themselves more.
There is nothing is more hypocritical than the debate about saving the forest. The forest is burning, while the members of the General Assembly make war and play with it. The forest — the pillar of our global climate — is disappearing with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs planetary C02 is evaporating. This life-saving forest is seen in my country as an enemy to be defeated, a weed to be eradicated. The space where peasants live and grow coca because they have nothing else to grow is being demonized.
The members of the General Assembly are interested in my country only if they can throw poison into its forests, put its men into prison and exile its women. They have no interest in our children’s education, they want to destroy our forest and extract coal and oil from its bowels. Our poison-absorbing sponge is of no use, they prefer to spread more poison into the atmosphere.
For the members of the General Assembly, we provide an excuse for the emptiness and loneliness of their own societies, which leads them to live in a drug bubble. We hide them from their problems, which they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the forests, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forest burn, while hypocrites pursue the plants with poison in order to hide the disasters of their own societies, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil in order to satisfy their other addiction — to consumption, to power, to money.
Which is more toxic to humankind — cocaine, coal or oil? The judgement of power has decreed that cocaine is a poison and must be persecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose — more deaths are caused by contamination of the drug during its illicit trade. Meanwhile, they have declared that coal and oil must be protected, with the result that their use could lead to humankind’s extinction. That is the
state of world power, of injustice and of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the forest’s exuberance and vitality a lustfulness and sinfulness — the root cause of the sadness in their societies, which are steeped in the insatiable compulsion to have and to consume.
How can they hide the loneliness in people’s hearts, the emptiness of societies devoid of affection and competitive to the point of trapping people’s souls in loneliness, if not by blaming the plant, the people who grow it and the liberal secrets of the jungle? According to the irrational world Powers, it is not the market that is to blame for shortening humankind’s existence, but the forest and those who live in it.
The bank accounts have become unlimited, the savings of the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent in centuries. The sadness of existence created by that artificial call for competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and possessions has another side to it — addiction to drugs in people who lose the contest, in the artificial race into which they have transformed humankind.
The disease of loneliness will not be cured by spreading glyphosate in the forest. It is not the forest that is to blame. Those to blame are the societies trained to engage in endless consumption and into stupidly mistaking consumption for happiness, while filling the pockets of the powerful with money. The forest is not to blame for drug addiction — it is the irrational behaviour of the world Powers. Give them a dose of light, of reason. Turn the century’s lights back on.
The war on drugs has lasted 40 years. If we do not change course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, a drug that Latin America does not produce. It will see millions of African-Americans incarcerated in private prisons. African-American prisoners will become a business venture for prison companies. One million more Latin Americans will be murdered, our waters and green fields will be filled with blood and the dream of democracy will die, both in my America and in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great Athens of the European West.
If we hide the truth, we will see the forest and our democracies die. The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed.
Deadly drug use has increased, progressing from soft drugs to harder drugs. Genocide has been perpetrated on my continent, and in my country millions of people have been sent to prison — and they have blamed the forest and its plants in order to hide their own social guilt. They have filled their speeches and their policies with nonsense.
On behalf of my wounded Latin America, I call for an end to the irrational war on drugs. Reducing drug consumption does not require wars or weapons. It requires us all to build better societies — more caring, affectionate societies, in which the intensity of life protects us from addictions and new forms of slavery. Do the members of the General Assembly want fewer drugs? Let them think about less money, more love. Let them think about the rational exercise of power.
Let them not taint the beauty of my homeland with their poisons. Let them help us, without hypocrisy, to save the Amazon forest in order to ensure humankind’s existence on the planet. They brought the scientists together, who spoke with reason. Their mathematics and climatological models demonstrated that the end of the human species is near and that we no longer have millenniums — or even centuries — left. Science set the alarm bells ringing, and we stopped listening to them. War has 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 into funds to save humankind, when it was necessary to move away as soon as possible from coal and oil — they invented one war after another. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas. In the twenty-first century, they discovered the worst of their addictions: money and oil. Wars have served for them as an excuse to not take action to combat the climate crisis and shown them how dependent they are on what will finish off the human species.
When the members of the General Assembly see starving and thirsty people migrating north by the millions, to where the water is, they enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns and shoot at them. They expel them as if they were not human beings, five times worse than the mentality of those whose policies created the gas chambers and concentration camps. They have brought us back on a global scale to 1933 — the day of the great triumph of the assault on reason. Do they not
see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on their countries is to bring back the flow of nutrients into the water that fills the rivers and fields?
The climate disaster fills us with viruses that spread devastation, but they do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. They say that the market will save us from what the market itself created. Humankind, like Frankenstein, lets the market — and greed — act without planning, abandoning logic and reason. It subordinates human reason to greed. What is the point of war when what we need to do is save the human species? What is the point of NATO and empires when the end of intelligence is near?
The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people, and the members of the General Assembly may be assured that it is not the planet but capital that will be to blame. The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of relationships geared to consuming more and more and producing more and more so that some of us earn more and more is the cause of the climate disaster. They harnessed the logic of the expanded accumulation of capital to the use of coal- and petrol- fired engines, and they unleashed a hurricane: the chemical changes in our atmosphere will be more and more widespread and deadly. Now in a parallel word, the expanded accumulation of capital is the expanded accumulation of death.
From the land of forests and beauty — where they decided to make the Amazon forest the enemy and to extradite and imprison its farmers — I urge the members of the General Assembly to stop the war and put an end to the climate disaster. Here in the Amazon forest, humankind has failed. Behind the conflagrations burning there, behind the poisoning, lies the failure of humankind as a civilization. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, lies the real addiction of this current phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit and to money. That is the massive deadly machinery that could wipe out humankind.
As President of one of the most beautiful — and blood-drenched and exploited — countries on Earth, I call for an end to the war on drugs and for our people to be allowed to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America to come together with one voice in order to defeat the irrational behaviour that is making martyrs of our physical bodies. I call on the members of the General Assembly to save the entirety of the Amazon forest using resources that can be allocated worldwide to ensuring life.
For those members that do not have the capacity to finance the funding of the revitalization of the forests or for which it is harder to allocate money to life than to weapons, I call on them to reduce foreign debt in order to release our own budget spaces, through which the work of saving humankind and life on the planet can be undertaken. We can do it if they do not want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature.
I call on all members of the General Assembly, and in particular I call on all Latin America, to engage in dialogue to end the war. Do not pressure us to take a side in the 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 us all closer to the end of time in our great orgy of irrationality. On behalf of Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace.
Only in peace can we save lives on this Earth of ours. There can be no total peace without social, economic and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. If there is no peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. And without social justice, there is no social peace.