Earlier this year, a young Colombian named Mateo was going about his daily student activities in Eastern Europe. Like many Latin American migrants, Mateo was focused on pursuing his dreams — in his case, a medical degree from Zaporizhzhya National University. One day in February, however, that dream became a nightmare, all because of Russia’s senseless war against Ukraine. As the entire world, flabbergasted, watched the outbreak of a war of dimensions that had not been seen for decades, Mateo had to experience it first-hand. He came in very close proximity to dangerous military actions that I prefer not to discuss today, out of respect for him and his traumatic experience. Relying on his own ingenuity and the solidarity of others, he used various means of transport, including horses, to make his way to the nearest border.
Meanwhile, as all of that was going on, Ecuador was establishing a national crisis committee, which fulfilled its objective of repatriating 730 Ecuadorian citizens via humanitarian flights. Mateo, whose sister is Ecuadorian, thereby making him part of a transnational family, was able to board one of those flights. His Colombian parents now live in Ecuador, thanks to protection visas granted by our Government. And Mateo was not the only one — that same story was experienced by several Colombian, Peruvian, Latin American and even Ukrainian citizens who managed to escape the war thanks to the enormous diplomatic effort led by our country. I am relating all of this now because if everyone here takes only one message from me with them today, I would like it to be this — that Ecuador is here for the world and will leave no one behind. That is why I am confident that the world will not leave Ecuador behind when it comes to the challenges we face.
When I prepare for events like these, I usually consult with renowned international relations experts. They cite to me the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, which speak of the sovereign equality of States; good faith; the peaceful settlement of disputes; territorial integrity and political independence; the non-use of force; full respect for human rights and so on and so forth. Those are all admirable concepts that for almost eight decades have preserved a relative stability that is now being challenged. Nevertheless, I wanted to begin my address by talking about Mateo, a Latin American student who, like thousands of others, was in Ukraine chasing a dream. Those who know me know that I am neither a scholar nor an academic nor a regular speaker at international forums. The reality is that for most of my life, I have cultivated a very simple idea, which is that the only way to create value is to always put people — human beings — first in everything we do. It is always in human beings — in people — that I place my trust, and I want to explain exactly why that is important.
I want to explain the reasons why I argue that a people-first approach is vital not only to individual countries but also to building a more peaceful and stable world. I firmly believe that any political institution or system, whether national or international, derives its legitimacy from the good it is able to produce for its citizens. It must not only base its legitimacy on that principle but renew it daily with the consent of the people it serves. Here in this great institution, we are a family of nations, and nations are families of citizens. The welfare of our larger, extended family — as well as its stability and, ultimately, its peace — depends on what happens within each of our smaller, immediate families. Take it from someone who leads a country today where in the past, marginality and neglect have served as breeding grounds for the magic formulas of the most predictable kind of populism.
I refer here to the same populism that subsequently takes off the mask and shows its true authoritarian face; the same populism that when it is governing, flirts with dangerous actors who hide beyond the reach of our international institutions to sponsor some of the threats that bring us here today, when we ask ourselves what to do about them. That challenge is multifaceted, but I will always insist that if we want to keep those threats at bay, we must start by shunning the ugly face of authoritarianism. In order to do that, we will always circle back to the need to create opportunities for the
people themselves. We need a world order in which all citizens feel included, connected and represented; an interdependent order where opportunities flow freely from one corner of the world to another. We need to strike a balance whereby it becomes increasingly difficult for aspiring warlords to blame their failures on so-called asymmetries in the world order. We must open the doors of opportunity to more citizens and never again close them behind a false notion of sovereignty that in reality is simply hubris. We need to understand that international security is not a right to simply be demanded, but a duty that we all share.
My Government has in fact found itself in a strange position whereby it has had to inaugurate a fight against a threat that in the past was concealed rather than confronted. I am talking about shady actors who, rather than being countered, were quietly accommodated in hopes that no one would detect them. Today Ecuador is engaged head-on in an unprecedented fight against drug trafficking, as evidenced by the latest World Drug Report 2022, which confirms that Ecuador is third in the world among countries seizing cocaine. Today as never before we are increasing our activities to maximize narcotics seizures and dismantle the transnational gangs that transport them. We know that we are not the only ones fighting that monster, which incidentally has not one but several heads, including human trafficking, money-laundering, illegal arms trafficking and even illegal mining. It is estimated that transnational crime is shifting between $1.6 and $2.2 trillion in a year — a figure dozens of times the size of the economy of a country like Ecuador.
But it would be a mistake to quantify the consequences of transnational crime in economic terms alone. They must be measured above all in irreparable losses, in lives taken and dreams cut short, in the heartrending cries of the families affected, but also in the fearful silence that they impose on some communities. Just two days ago, in the very centre of the city of Guayaquil, where I was born, a prosecutor was cowardly gunned down by organized crime assassins. He was an official whose investigations included major cases involving transnational mafias. His assassination means not only that Ecuador has lost a servant of the law but also that his children will grow up without a father. His murder teaches us an additional lesson, which is that transnational crime requires a transnational solution. We have two options in that regard. Either we suffer separately, due to a coordinated enemy that acts within several countries to make a mockery of our laws, or we unite to defeat it. Recent events have made it clear that we need even greater collaboration, and I will never tire of insisting on that. Ecuador, with its record levels of drug seizures but also the sacrifices of its servants, has proved that it deserves international help and support in its fight against drug trafficking and to strengthen the institutions where those officers are based.
I would also like to take advantage of this forum to appeal for us to work together in the fight against gender-based violence. For Ecuador, the disappearance of a brave woman, a lawyer, a mother and a daughter, should serve as a symbol of the challenge of ending violence against women. Ecuador has shown that it is here for the world, and I am confident that the world will reciprocate that support in those challenges.
In terms of human mobility, we have taken decisions that have been applauded. Not only have we maintained our long history as a country of transit, reception and refuge for migrants, we have traditionally been among the States receiving the largest number of refugees in the entire Western hemisphere. And beyond that act of reception, I would like to point to the treatment that those refugees receive once they set foot on Ecuadorian soil. We make special efforts to guarantee the rights and, above all, the integration of migrants, particularly when it comes to families whose countries of origin offer no life alternatives beyond simply fleeing those nations. With half a million Venezuelans living in Ecuador today, we are one of the three principal hosts of migrants from that country. Despite our budgetary difficulties, we provide them with health care, education and other social services. We have also begun a broad regularization process. I would ask everyone here to think about what that means for a small country like ours and then about the impact that a population of that size would have on their own country. That is why I reiterate that Ecuador is here for the world and that I am confident that the world will support us in our regularization plan for our Venezuelan brothers and sisters who have had to leave their country.
I have firm hopes that this will be the case, but that is not the only issue at hand. Ecuador is also playing its part in confronting the climate crisis. As a country that emits greenhouse gases, we account for only 0.8 per cent of global emissions. Nevertheless, without hesitation or waiting for anyone to suggest it, my Government took the decision to make Ecuador the first country in Latin America — and only the fourth in the world — to adopt
a cross-cutting policy on our ecological transition, including by elevating it to the ministerial level.
Climate change does not ask to what extent we have industrialized in the past but how much we can contribute to the future. That is why, almost a year ago, at the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow, I announced the creation of the new Hermandad marine reserve in the Galapagos Islands, which increases the protected area of that natural heritage of humankind by 60,000 square kilometres. That was complemented this year by the signing of a declaration for the conservation and management of the ecosystems that make up the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, which was signed with my fellow Presidents of Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama to lend a new dimension and political impetus to the corridor’s objectives. That is how we are opening up new opportunities for cooperation, funding and technical assistance for the conservation of biodiversity in Ecuador, the region and indeed the world. But we are going much further — within this very Organization, we have pushed for the mandate of the United Nations Environment Assembly to include the negotiation of a future treaty on plastic pollution. So when it comes environmental conservation, too, Ecuador is here for the world.
In each of the issues I have outlined and in each of the challenges and unknown scenarios that the future holds, Ecuador believes firmly that we will find the answers within ourselves, given our recognition that as human beings who share this Earth, what we have in common is far greater than what divides us. We may even be unaware that we hold in our own hands the keys to solving the problems faced by other peoples or individuals. In fact that is what happened to Mateo, the student we were able to rescue from Ukraine. If we apply that way of thinking to every challenge and if we only dare to approach every threat from a united perspective, I know that we will be able to go much further.
Take, for example, the food crisis, which has been aggravated by the conflict in Ukraine and has exacerbated malnutrition in many countries. International figures show that 52 million children under five are suffering from malnutrition, 17 million from severe malnutrition and 155 million from stunted growth. In Ecuador, the disease affects almost 30 per cent of children under the age of two, and in some even more tragic cases, some of our poorest provinces are seeing malnutrition rates of more than 35 per cent. My Government has been a pioneer in tackling that problem. We have created a technical secretariat, Ecuador Grows without Child Malnutrition, and set a very clear goal of reducing child malnutrition by six percentage points during my term of office and institutionalizing the process so that future Governments can continue that endeavour. To that end, we have encouraged the participation of civil society, academia, the private sector and local Government. But we can go much further if we only dare to think as a global community.
It is no secret that Ecuador’s lands can be extraordinarily fertile and productive when they are sown with optimism and dedication. We are the country of cocoa, bananas and shrimp, but also of dragon fruit, avocados and many other agricultural products. It makes no sense that our children, or those anywhere else in the world, should suffer from hunger in any context — even less so when the land is there, ready to be harvested not only for food but also for opportunities. Today’s new Ecuador offers advantages that can serve not only to alleviate hunger but to create a more stable and peaceful world, where citizens are increasingly included each day through the creation of opportunities. That is the world I see and the world that Ecuador proposes.
Finally, as former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said, peace is a way of being, of relating to others and of living on this planet. It cannot be decreed solely through treaties. It must be nurtured through the dignity, rights and capacities of every man and woman. I believe that those words, in a nutshell, encapsulate the spirit of what I have said today. I would also like to take this opportunity to express Ecuador’s support for the leadership of the current Secretary-General, Mr. Antonio Guterres.
I would like to conclude by thanking all Member States for their overwhelming support for my country’s election to be a member of the Security Council for the 2023-2024 term. We will undertake our membership in a context in which humankind is experiencing a period of great uncertainty and exceptional challenges. But I want to assure the Assembly that Ecuador will be here as always, doing its duty for the world. We will conduct ourselves with coherence and transparency and with an emphasis on supporting humanitarian assistance, peace operations, the protection of civilians in situations of armed conflict, the women and peace and security
agenda and the fight against arms trafficking, all while addressing emerging threats in the context of sustainable peace efforts.
In every decision, every mediation and every opportunity to contribute to the peace and stability of our planet, the President can rest assured that Ecuador will be here for its fellow Member States and their citizens. Ecuador will always be here for the world.