At
the outset, as this is the first time that I am attending in
my capacity as the President of the Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela, I wish to thank the General Assembly,
all its representative Governments and the various
bodies of the United Nations system for the heartfelt
tribute that was paid simultaneously at United Nations
Headquarters in New York, in Geneva and other
places in the world to an extraordinary human being,
Commander Hugo Chávez, who always carried the
banners of peace, equality and respect for our peoples.
That is the first thing I wish to convey from my heart
on behalf of the people of Venezuela and to recall and
invoke his spirit of tackling imperialism and injustice.
We have had debates for several decades now on the
need to reform the Organization, and various Presidents
that have presided over the Assembly. This morning, I
strongly reminded Presidents Dilma Rousseff, Cristina
Fernández, Evo Morales Ayma and other Presidents
of the Americas of the need to reorient, readjust and
tweak the entire United Nations system. This system
has been in place for 70 years since the end of the so-
called Second World War, which took place in Europe
and other parts of the world between 1939 and 1945.
The United Nations Charter is one of the most
beautiful poems that we could ever read. It has well
and truly become an instrument that has been set
aside, overlooked and consistently flouted in terms of
its fundamental objectives are concerned. The United
Nations is an historic human experiment that has become
a landmark because never before has humankind had
a forum to meet to address issues of peace, affecting
life and death, and to negotiate solutions to conflicts.
After 7,000 years of civilization as we know it — a
review of which reveals a history of empires and the
ongoing battle to distribute the wealth and territory of
the world — only with the establishment of this system
in 1945 did we begin to get a glimpse of future light
at the end of a long tunnel of battles, wars and global
conflicts.
We call for the renewed relevance of the United
Nations, above and beyond any criticism that may be
levelled against it. Given the human importance of
this institution, we insist on the need for an in-depth
transformation, as Commander Hugo Chávez said on
many occasions right here in this Hall. In his famous
statements in defence of the causes of humankind,
he stressed the need for a far-reaching democratic
overhaul of the United Nations system. As President
Jacob Zuma of our sister country South Africa said, we
must democratize and overhaul the Security Council.
The role of the regions today is different from
what it was in 1945. This is another world. The United
Nations was born to deal with post-war reconstruction
and the issues that had given rise to conflicts. The
United Nations has to deal today with a multicentric,
multipolar world of numerous actors, with emerging
countries and regions that have their own thoughts,
aspirations and desire to be respected in this world. The
United Nations has to adapt and submit to the broader
sovereignty of the peoples of this world, who are crying
out for their voices to be heard, heeded and respected.
We have heard speeches today at the start of this
sixty-ninth session. We also believe in strengthening the
role of the Secretary-General. As we have said so many
times we must have a Secretary-General who represents
all of us and who has the political and institutional
clout to find solutions to the world’s conflicts. We must
reconfigure the system and functions of the General
Assembly. We must democratize it and give it a leading
role to ensure that the great debates that take place here
can always successfully address the major issues facing
the world. That is why we believe that we must build a
new United Nations in a bid for a new multipolar world
of peace where there no empire can impose its will on a
unipolar world. This is urgent for the entire world.
Above and beyond what officials of the various
Governments represented in this Hall may believe,
we already have another world where we all wish to
speak, think and decide our own fate and to achieve
peace for our peoples. A new regionalism has come to
the fore. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, we saw the
birth of the European Union as an experiment in the
new regionalism that is admired and emulated by many
throughout the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, we saw
the emergence of the Organization of African Unity, an
extraordinary system to organize the brotherly African
continent to address the issues of development and
life. Our mother Africa was one of the most suffering
regions the world.
Now as we embark on the twenty-first century,
Latin America is taking its place. We have seen new
organizations arise in Latin America. On 14 December,
we will commemorate in Havana, Cuba, a heroic
island and great homeland, the tenth anniversary of
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. We have
assumed an important role in building a new social
and economic order in defence of such major causes
as climate change. In existence for 10 years now, that
youthful organization, partnership or alliance is now
looking forward to the rest of the twenty-first century.
I would also mention Petrocaribe and its
18 brotherly member States. I hope I may be forgiven if
I seem immodest, but PetroCaribe is a model that best
shows how we can have a new world of peace, justice,
solidarity, cooperation and complementarity among
nations. To the powerful of the world, those who wield
all the capital and all the economic power, I say that we
can have another world. We are starting to build it in
the Americas.
Also emerging is the Union of South American
Nations (UNASUR), representing a new southern
regionalism that was founded on 16 April 2007 with the
participation of new leaders in Latin America and our
Commander Hugo Chávez. It is a most interesting and
important bloc that is now starting to forge ties with the
rest of the emerging world.
We recently held a very interesting and important
meeting for the remainder of the decade between the
BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa, who represent the hope for development
through new mechanisms — and UNASUR in Brasilia,
and we decided to share our experiences. The BRICS
Bank and the Banco del Sur would be a new financial
architecture for the world that must emerge from this
new regionalism. The Community of Latin American
and Caribbean States (CELAC) was established on
3 December 2011 in Caracas, and is already growing
strong. We have held summits in Santiago de Chile and
Havana and will hold another in San José in January.
All of Latin America is coming together optimistically
in this new regionalism.
Based on this experience, we are seeing new
structures arise towards the establishment of a road
map for overhauling the United Nations system. Let
the call for reform of the Organization not fall through
the cracks here in this Hall. We must find the way.
We must try to come up with a common road map for
humankding because we need it if we are to tackle the
major issues before us.
For 22 years, the United Nations has customarily
voted with record insistence for a cause that is not
just a cause of the Americas but one espoused by the
peoples and Governments of this world. I speak of the
rejection of the economic embargo against our brother
Republic of Cuba — an anachronistic vestige of the
Cold War. The President of Estonia spoke earlier about
the anachronisms of the Cold War and the systems of
economic persecution used to impose political regimes
and subjugate peoples. We are here on behalf of the
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to confirm our support
for the 50-year struggle of the people and Government
of Cuba against the criminal blockade. I ask President
Obama: When will you seize the opportunity to go
down in history by putting an end once and for all to the
criminal economic and trade embargo and persecution
of our brother country of Cuba?
We also see new causes arise in the current
struggles facing our region. We have taken them on in
unison. I wish here to recognize as a great step forward
the decision taken by the General Assembly two weeks
ago in support of the Argentine Republic and President
Cristina Fernández in her struggle against the financial
plundering of the vulture funds. We want to support her
in every way we can to ensure that the General Assembly,
in accordance with the proposal of the Group of 77
and China and in as timely and efficient a manner as
possible, drafts a high-quality document mandating the
defence of the nations represented by the Organization,
especially the poor countries of the developing world,
against vulture funds that seek to plunder our economies
and impose detrimental economic, institutional and
political systems. We confirm the full solidarity of the
people of Venezuela with the people of Argentina, and
indeed the solidarity of the CELAC countries. Let us
move towards this historic decision. We received 124
votes in favour last week.
As we did at the CELAC summit in Havana,
Venezuela also calls on the United Nations to support as
closely and warmly as it can and enforce the decisions
calling on the United States of America to enforce and
execute a decolonization plan for Puerto Rico. Puerto
Rico was invited to join CELAC because it is Caribbean
and it is ours. We raise our voice to make it heard in this
Hall to call for the release of a man whose name many
here will hear for the first time. President Jacob Zuma
of South Africa spoke of the great Madiba, Nelson
Mandela, who was forgotten for many years, despite
the fact that many now claim him as a representative
of their causes. That is fine. Nelson Mandela represents
the human capacity of resilience and resistance enjoyed
by people as they seek to achieve the objectives of
justice and peace.
That is why I raise the name of a man who almost
35 years ago was imprisoned and has been subjected
to torture — a man with a family, a man from Latin
America and the Caribbean, a man like us. We are
talking about the Puerto Rican Oscar López Rivera, the
longest-held political prisoner who remains in a United
States prison to this day. We demand his immediate
release. His only sin was to fight for independence and
to defend the beautiful flag and star of the dignity of
our sister country of Puerto Rico. These are the causes
of this historic moment.
Venezuela is in the midst of a people’s democratic
revolution that began with an unimpeachable
constitutional event. For the first time in the history
of our country, the Constitution of the Republic was
debated by the people and approved by a referendum
with the participation of the sovereign vote of the
people of Venezuela in 1999. Since then, we have been
developing and carrying out a process of political and
social liberation.
We are trying to overcome poverty. In 2015, we
will have the post-2015 development agenda and the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be over.
Through great effort, the Bolivarian Venezuela led
by our Commander Hugo Chávez, was fortunately
able achieve practically all the MDGs. We have an
enrolment rate of more than 90 per cent in almost all
schools, and we offer free, quality education from basic
schools through to universities. We have lowered the
unemployment rate from 20 per cent five years ago to
5.5 per cent at the end of last year. We have changed
the curves. We had vulnerable employment to the
tune of 60 per cent; now, 60 per cent of those jobs are
protected by social security, and are remunerated at a
fair, regulated rate.
I could spend hours here talking of the progress we
have made towards the MDGs. We have been able to
salvage our oil wealth. I am sure Members will know
that we have the largest oil reserves on the planet in
the beautiful Orinoco basin, and we have the largest oil
fields there. For the first time in 90 years, we recovered
full control over our own petroleum resources as the
anchor for our economic and social development.
Venezuela has had to suffer ongoing harassment and
persecution at the hands of the imperial forces and the
allies of the United States empire, who have sought
again and again to undermine our democracy. One such
attempt was the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez.
Following his death on 5 March 2013, those forces
resumed their activities to undermine our country. I
thank the Governments of the world for their solidarity
with Venezuela, which has been struggling and
resisting. They could not prevail against Hugo Chávez
and they cannot prevail against us. We are still on the
path towards revolution, democracy, independence and
dignity, with our own voice speaking to the world.
There are major problems that we now have
to address at this point. As members well know,
one such problem — perhaps the greatest threat of
all — is the virus that causes Ebola haemorrhagic fever.
If this world and our United Nations system had been
somewhat more humane, we would have focused on
lending our support to tackling this real threat instead
of sending drones, missiles and bombs to destroy the
people of Gaza or to bomb the people of Iraq and Syria.
The President of Chad announced that his country had
decided to donate $2 million to the Ebola fund. The
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is going to be giving
$5 million to the fund to support Africa and the needy
people of the world.
Let us be clear. We should be discussing the
scientific reports here and taking decisions based
on those reports. We should be focused on another
important issue affecting the survival of humankind on
this Earth — climate change. A poem of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas, which was read out yesterday,
says that after they can no longer poison the rivers,
after they have poisoned our lakes, once there is not
even one fish left to eat, then the powerful of the
world will have to eat each other. They want to create
extraneous formulas when all they need to do is to make
an extraordinary effort and recognize climate change
as a climatic emergency. We should not just make
speeches and vague offers; we must restore sanity to
the Organization if we are to strengthen it, and place at
the forefront of our agenda the real common problems
facing us.
Today in the Security Council, they adopted a
series of decisions in a bid to combat terrorism. Let
us be clear: we must combat terrorism. The Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America has been
condemning terrorism for more than a year and a
half. We are deeply pained by the murder of Western
journalists and the dastardly acts of these terrorists, but
a year and a half ago when boys and girls were captured
by these terrorist and other groups in Syria, we were not
that pained at that time. They were beheading women
in mosques. The pain should be the same.
Should our pain be greater depending on the colour
or origin of the skin of a person or the origin of that
person? The loss of human lives should pain us all, and
we therefore condemn the terrorist attack perpetrated
by NATO and its allies to change the regime in Syria.
I am here to say, with force of truth, on behalf of the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
and my Government, that if the Government of Syria
had been overthrown by those imperial attacks, today
in that entire region of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan
we would see the power of those terrorists take root.
As painful as it may be, we have to say that President
Bashar Al-Assad and the democratic and constitutional
Government of Syria has always combated terrorism
and has suffered thousands of deaths. We believe that
instead of the continual, demented bombing, must
strike a great alliance of peace against terrorism,
respecting the sovereignty of countries and sovereign
Governments throughout that region. I would ask the
delegation of the United States take note of this message
and convey it to President Obama.
Only an alliance that respects the sovereignty
of those nations, along with the cooperation of
their Governments, peoples and armed forces, will
overthrow the Islamic State and the terrorist forces
advancing like monster against the West. There is no
other way to overthrow them — certainly not with
bombs that kill mostly the innocent. They never kill the
armed forces; they always kill the innocent. After so
much death and bombing of the brotherly Arab people
of Iraq, we have to invite the sovereign Governments
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan and Egypt and indeed the entire region to come
up with a comprehensive political, military, cultural
and communication strategy that can be supported by
the Security Council. Anything else is crazy.
Let us consider what happened in Libya, as noted
by the President of Chad. It only fomented hatred and
an anti-Al-Qadhafi front. What is happening in Libya?
It has become a territory for trafficking in arms and
explosives by terrorist groups fighting for scraps of
territory. We have seen the end of the beautiful history
of the people of our brother country of Libya. It is a
crazy race towards more violence and terrorism. A
more dangerous world has emerged from the demented
work of those who lead and make decisions in the
Organization.
We humbly lend our voice and our proposal to the
table, and we do so with genuine love. That is how we
show our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We in
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
will continue to show our solidarity with them.
Venezuela, as Members know, has opened a modest
air-bridge to provide logistical support, food, blankets
and medicines in support of the people of Palestine who
recently suffered a brutal attack. We want peace, total
peace. Our Organization needs to be overhauled so that
everyone can enjoy total peace. It is not through the
threat of the use of force, or the use of force, or internal
competition to overthrow Governments such as the
one that I lead, that we will have stable peace. No, it
is respect for international law that will lead to stable
peace and full security.
Lastly, I wish to thank the General Assembly for
its support. Next year, 2015, Venezuela, with members’
support, will assume leadership of the Non-Aligned
Movement for the next three years. We humbly aspire
to play a genuine role in mobilizing and revitalizing the
entire process of United Nations reform. The process
must include the elaboration of an agenda of world
priorities in which we will all have a voice and a vote,
and no one can impose their will on the others. Next
year, delegations from throughout the world will be
welcome at the historic Summit of the Non-Aligned
Movement in Caracas.