I should like to begin by remembering the
millions of human beings who are the victims of the
policies of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Let us
remember the victims of the Holocaust. Let us
remember the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let
us remember the victims of slavery and apartheid. Let
us remember the victims of the wars of occupation of
Viet Nam and Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic,
Grenada, Panama and Nicaragua. Let us remember the
heroic and noble Cuban people, who have suffered all
kinds of aggression and a brutal and inhumane
blockade. Let us remember the five heroes who are
prisoners of the empire because they were fighting
terrorism. Let us remember the victims of the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the millions and
millions of men and women who have been and
continue to be victims of the genocide caused by global
capitalism. Let us remember the victims of
discrimination and apartheid at the hands of those who
refuse to admit into the developed countries, peoples
who, in Latin America, are attempting to come into the
United States, and people in Africa and Asia who are
trying to go to the European nations. Our thoughts, our
appreciation and our solidarity go to the victims of
natural disasters, who are at the same time victims of
global imperialist capitalism, which, through its
development-oriented policy continues to bring
destruction, death and poverty, becoming the greatest
aggressor of mother Earth, now destroyed by the
avarice of imperialist capitalism.
Let us remember the recent victims of natural
occurrences triggered by these spoliations resulting
from imperialist global capitalism: the victims of
Hurricane Katrina, the victims of the earthquake in
Peru, the victims of the floods in Africa, the victims
among the indigenous peoples the Miskito and
Mayan peoples of Hurricane Felix, in Central
America, Latin America and the Caribbean and the
land of Sandino and Rubén Darío. Our brothers and
sisters in the Miskito and Mayan peoples who achieved
autonomy in 1987 and who, today, are part of a process
whereby their full rights will be recognized, under the
Autonomy Act, have asked me to express their
appreciation to the United Nations because that battle
has been going on for more than 20 years and now we
are beginning to recognize the rights of indigenous
peoples. They have asked me to circulate here, in the
United Nations, a document signed by our brothers, the
leaders of the Miskito and Mayan peoples,
Afrodescendant peoples, victims of Hurricane Felix, so
that it may be seen by you all, our brothers and sisters
who represent the peoples of the world.
In the period from 1979 to 1989, I had the
opportunity to speak before the United Nations General
Assembly, and I remember well the speeches and
messages and positions from that time. Eighteen years
have gone by, and thanks to the unending struggle of
the Sandinist people, I am here again today to address
these words to the Assembly. This morning, when this
general debate began, I listened carefully to the words
of the second speaker, who spoke for exactly
20 minutes and I myself hope not to exceed
20 minutes and I cannot find any difference between
the thoughts, words and actions of those who, at the
time, were at the helm of that imperialist power, and
the speech that I heard this morning.
The presidents of the United States change, and
they may come to office with the best intentions and
may feel that they are doing good for humanity. But
they fail to understand that they are no more than the
instruments of yet another empire among the many
empires that have imposed themselves on our planet,
and they forget that the life of empires is ephemeral.
They rise, they grow arrogant and mighty and then
begin to dictate as if they were gods telling people
what is good and bad, determining how they provide
what they call assistance which is no more than
paying back the historical debt they owe to our
peoples. What they are doing is simply responding to
empire, to the politics of Empire and for that reason we
should not be surprised that not only are we hearing the
same speeches all over again, but also that we are
seeing the same conditions of oppression and violence
and terror being suffered by humanity. And today, we
are more threatened than we were 18 years ago when I
last had the opportunity to speak before the United
Nations.
Today, under the tyranny of global imperialist
capitalism, there is an international economic order, of
course there is, but who dictates that international
economic order? It is dictated by a minority of
dictators who impose their interests, the same old
interests. They are the ones who enslaved Africans and
enslaved and oppressed our indigenous forefathers.
They are the ones who wiped out the original peoples
of the United States. Then immigrants from Europe
came over here and unperturbedly by what right?
began to mix with those people, and to become in turn,
owners of what did not belong to them. They robbed
the original peoples of their rights and their cultures
and imposed their culture and the interests of the
colonizers. That is what gave rise to what we call today
the most exemplary democracy in the world, when
really, it is a tyranny the biggest, most
overwhelming dictatorship that has ever existed
throughout the history of humanity.
I am referring to the tyranny of the United States
empire. If anyone has doubts, let us see how its
President spoke to us this morning. He spoke of Cuba
with a complete lack of respect while representing a
system that ordered the assassination of its President,
our dear brother Fidel Castro, whom we had for his
extraordinary solidarity, firmness and principled
consistency in his struggle for the cause of humankind.
They have maintained a brutal blockade against
Cuba, while for interests of State, they set aside their
so-called democratic principles when, for economic
reasons, they act together with other nations with
which they supposedly have ideological differences:
capital unites them and ideological differences
disappear.
On what authority and by what right does he
question the right of the peoples of Iran and the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to nuclear
development for peaceful purposes? And even if they
wanted to use nuclear power for military purposes, on
whose authority and by what right does the only State
in history to have dropped atomic bombs on innocent
people, as it did on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, condemn
the people of Iran, who are working to develop nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes? They have decided that
this is not for peaceful purposes, but who gave them
that right? They gave it to themselves, and they are
imposing that on the General Assembly, and the
Assembly is simply a reflection of the realities of a
world where a capitalist and imperialist minority is
imposing global capitalism and establishing an order to
exploit, repress, impoverish, enslave and impose
apartheid against Latin American migrants and against
African migrants in Europe. Global capitalism has only
one head, but it has tentacles everywhere.
On what authority can the country that possesses
the greatest nuclear arsenal in the world, or any other
country possessing nuclear weapons, come here and
seek to question the rights of other countries to the
peaceful development of nuclear energy? What moral
authority do they have to question the right of any
people to develop nuclear energy for peaceful or even
for military purposes?
Objectively, this is not the best path for
humankind. The best path for humankind is for nuclear
weapons to disappear altogether. If the United States,
its people and its Presidents and I do not want to
single out any individual President or leader of an
empire; an empire is an empire, and it does not matter
who is heading the empire, whether they call
themselves Democrat or Republican really want to
demonstrate their commitment to putting an end to the
threat of nuclear energy being used for military
purposes, then they have to be the first to move
towards a policy of nuclear disarmament, a policy that
should encompass all those that possess nuclear
weapons. Then they would have the moral authority to
say that no people in the world should devote resources
to developing nuclear technology for military purposes.
Then, all nations would have the possibility and the
right to opt for nuclear energy for peaceful purposes
an option that they would seek to deny to developing
peoples.
Eighteen years ago, from this very rostrum, I
spoke of the Palestinian issue. The Palestinian people
endure an ongoing bloody conflict with a country that
possesses nuclear weapons and that is entrenched in
the historic territory of the Palestinian people.
Eighteen years ago we spoke of the people of
Puerto Rico, a nation which is still fighting for its
independence. The United States continues
unambiguously to pursue its neo-colonial policies,
combining the most advanced and modern forms of
domination with the most retrograde forms of
domination, such as its military base in Guantánamo.
Eighteen years ago we spoke of armament, and
nothing has changed. Eighteen years ago we spoke of
war, and today things look much worse because of the
brutal war imposed by the empire and by its economic
and oil interests. They thought it would be easy to
occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have met with
resistance from those peoples. It was an invasion
launched on the basis of a campaign of lies: it was
uncertain that Iraq was in a position to produce nuclear
weapons.
So what can I conclude? I can conclude that the
enemy is still the same after these 18 years: here I am
again in the United Nations, and the enemy is still the
same.
The enemy is called global imperialist capitalism
and it is only we, the people, who can change things.
Peoples that have attained liberation were not given it
by those that enslaved them, but rather thanks to their
own struggle and the blood they shed, for example in
South Africa’s independence struggle. How many years
of disgrace, suffering, slavery and apartheid did they
endure in South Africa? That story is true for the whole
of the African continent. Those peoples achieved their
freedom despite modern colonialists consistently trying
to sustain these forms of occupation. To be sure, they
have adopted new forms of occupation and domination.
The liberation of our peoples is not guaranteed.
Our peoples must continue to give battle. The unity of
our peoples is the key: the unity of the Latin American
peoples, the Central American peoples and the
Caribbean peoples under the Bolivarian Alternative for
the Americas (ALBA). They are trying to repeat the
kind of action taken against Venezuela, when a
democratically elected president was faced with a
military coup. They are trying to repeat the history of
Salvador Allende, the history of Chile. But the United
Nations was not convened to say what barbarity had
taken place. Yet what had happened in Venezuela
needed to be condemned, because the Government had
been democratically elected. But no: in fact, the
imperialist Power moved immediately to recognize the
leaders of the coup. It was the Venezuelan people who
rose up to return the elected President to his place.
Thus, it is the people who decide their own fate.
Hence, we can all be full of the best intentions
about changing the United Nations. I do not doubt that
even representatives of countries that espouse global
capitalism and imperialism come here with the best of
intentions some of them. But they lose sight of the
fact that they are continuing their handout proposals
and approaches for these are indeed handouts. When
they talk about aid, they are insulting us. They have to
understand that once and for all. They have profited
from the privatization carried out in developing
countries by the huge multinational corporations. They
say that they come to help us. What businessman
comes to help? When a businessman invests, he invests
in order to make the biggest profit he can: not to invest
in the country, but rather to take away, because we
developing countries are considered to be insecure. In
short, we are the victims of a ransacking.
Compare the volume of the wealth that the
capitalist and developed countries are currently
extracting from our countries, the developing
countries, through their big companies and
multinational corporations with what Latin American
immigrants send back to their families from the United
States or what Asian and African immigrants in Europe
send back to their families: the latter really is a
miserable amount compared to the volume of wealth
that is being plundered on a daily basis by these
institutionalized forms of oppression.
However, immigrants working in the United
States or in Europe work harder than anyone else. They
are doing jobs that neither Europeans nor Americans
want to do, and for miserable wages. So who is doing
whom a favour? Indeed, nobody is doing any favours
for the Latin Americans who find work in the United
States and who manage to put aside a bit of money so
they can send $100 or $200 back to their families,
compared to the plundering by big businesses, which
go to developing countries not only to reap enormous
profits, but also to take advantage of cheap labour and
the conditionalities imposed by free trade agreements.
Human beings, societies and nations are all clashing
with free trade, and it remains to be seen who is the
strongest. Logically, it will be the strongest who
prevail. Free trade is the law of the jungle.
What the world needs is fair trade. What the
world demands is genuine change in the capitalist,
globalized, imperialist countries. They have to change
their concept of a free market; they have to exchange
the concept of free trade for that of fair trade and a fair
international market. Solving this problem is not a
question of reducing subsidies because plainly the
disparities are so enormous that that is impossible. This
problem will never be resolved piecemeal but through
profoundly radical change leading to the
democratization of the minority on planet Earth who
own the wealth, own the nuclear weapons, impose their
policies on the Assembly and go over the heads of the
Security Council. They impose their own laws, which
are now solidly entrenched, and they have no respect
for humanity. It is only by changing the policy within
those peoples, within those nations, within those
Governments that we can really obtain the fair world
that we are all talking about. For we all talk about a
just world. We all talk about a peaceful world. We all
talk about a world of brotherly love and solidarity. But
there is a wide gap between words and deeds.
Dear brothers and sisters, please accept the
greetings of the people of Nicaragua, a fighting people,
a people that has suffered interference from the empire
since 1856 before the triumph of the October
Revolution, the great Lenin revolution. Before the
East-West conflict had begun, Nicaragua was already
suffering from the expansionist policies of empire;
already we had to take arms to defend ourselves
against those who wanted to trample upon us and
impose Yankee presidents.
Dear brothers and sisters, we ask you to pass on
to your peoples our belief our certainty that
today, more than ever, there exist conditions for unity
among the Latin American and Caribbean peoples. We
are seeing growing unity among the African peoples.
The unity of the Asian peoples must grow as well, but
free from global capitalism. What good is speaking
about socialism if what we are actually building is
capitalism and if we are just creating a holy alliance
with global capitalism and imperialism? We have to
build this great unity in Africa, in Asia and in Latin
America, where we are marching with the same
strength, the same vigour and the same living
principles that were those of the African fighters like
Lumumba and Sekou Touré; the principles of the Latin
American fighters; the principles of the North
American fighters, the United States fighters; the
principles of the European fighters; the principles of
the Latin America of Bolívar, of Martí, of Sandino, of
Tupac Katari, of Tupac Amaru. Those principles still
live and will live as long as these forms of oppression
persist.
I have faith in God and the certainty that, just as
peoples, despite so much oppression and destruction,
have not surrendered or sold out, today, more than ever
before, peoples should rise up with pride and firmness
and dignity. They are not going to sell out and they are
not going to surrender to the global capitalist empire.