One week ago. I was in Santiago de Chile for the commemoration of the 50 years that had passed since the homicidal and bloody coup against President Salvador Allende. From there I went to my country, a poor neighbourhood of Medellin, where in the past the mafia would lure young people with the possibility of learning computer programming. I then went to Havana, an unjustly blockaded country whose inclusion on the list of terrorist-sponsoring countries for the simple reason of helping to make peace in Colombia was suggested and accomplished by the President of my country. And now I am here to address the General Assembly.
Over the year that has passed since my previous address at the United Nations (see A/77/PV.4). we have seen only a deepening of what the wealthy Davos meeting participants call a polycrisis. War continues. Hunger continues. The recession is increasing. And the climate crisis is showing its teeth, claiming thousands of lives and heating land and sea as never before. This has been a year of loss for humankind, which is hastening on and marching steadily towards the era of extinction. All those crises are in fact just one crisis: the crisis of life. It seems that world leaders have become the enemies of life. The crisis of life is being expressed in one devastating indicator. It began at the furthest corners of the Earth, far from the most remote regions. It is a silent march of people of different cultures who are mingling on their way like an infinitely nuanced painting. The colours are mixing together in an uncontainable stream. A multitude of all the colours is moving along trails and through the seas and jungles. They make a kind of work of art on the canvas of the Earth, a flow of tones, sounds, a mixture of clothes and cultures in an amalgam that remembers its beginnings.
It is an amalgam in a great march from the South to the North. The human exodus has begun.
Today there are tens of millions. Tomorrow — by 2070. according to scientific experts — the figure will have reached 3 billion. That is 3 billion people fleeing their beloved homes because those homes will be uninhabitable. In my homeland. Colombia, the country of beauty, the country of an explosion of life, only deserts will remain by 2070. The people will go to the North, no longer attracted by the glitter of wealth but by something simpler and more vital — water. Since the early stages of humankind, people have gone to where water is. to the North. Billions of people will defy armies and will change the Earth to do that. The exodus of the peoples to the North is an exact reflection of the dimension of the failure of Governments. This past year has been a time of defeat for Governments, a defeat for humankind. The exodus across borders has increased. Dogs and hounds have been set on immigrants. People have been put on horseback to pursue them, with whips in their hands, with restraints and chains. They have built prisons. So much has hatred grown for the foreign, the strange, that prisons have even been built at sea so that men and women of the South do not set foot on the land of white people, who still believe themselves to be a superior race and who. nostalgic for that, recall at their elections a leader who has even said so and who killed millions as a result.
The exodus has increased over this past year, showing how much the crisis of life is advancing. But while the clock ticks away the minutes that define life or death on our planet, instead of sitting down and taking the time to discuss how to defend life and then using our increased knowledge to expand life in our universe, we decide to waste our time killing one another. We are not thinking about how to expand life in the stars, but how to end it on our planet. We have devoted ourselves to war. We have been called to war. Latin America has been called on to deliver machinery and men to go to the battlefields. They forgot that our countries were invaded several times by the same people who today talk about fighting against invasions. They forgot that Iraq. Syria and Libya were invaded for oil. They forgot that the same reasons that are advanced to defend Zelenskyy are the same reasons that should be used to defend Palestine. They forgot that, to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, all wars must be brought to an end. But they helped to start one because it was convenient for world Powers in their game of
thrones, in their hunger games, and they forgot to end the other war because it was not convenient for them. What is the difference. I ask. between Ukraine and Palestine? Is it not time to end both wars, and others, and to make the most of the short time we have to build pathways to save life on the planet?
As President of Colombia, the country of beauty, whom a group within humankind — comprising millions of workers, women from working-class neighbourhoods. Indigenous and Black people, people from the countryside, young people of all colours — decided to elect and send to speak here before the Assembly. I propose to end the war so that we have time to save ourselves. I propose that the United Nations convene two peace conferences as soon as possible, one on Ukraine and the other on Palestine, not because there are no other wars in the world, as in my country, but because it would show how to build peace in all regions of the planet, because both — and only both — would put an end to hypocrisy as a political practice, because we could be sincere, a virtue without which we cannot be warriors for life. Today’s generation must decide and act as soon as possible to overcome the enormous hurricane that has been unleashed against life, from the dark but powerful sewers of greed, from the hurricane of capital that only looks at profit and that has engulfed the planet and the very basis of existence. I propose that we end the war in order to defend life from the climate crisis, the mother of all crises. The Summit that we have just held was designed to assess the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were set by Governments for 2030. Well, it is easy to make that assessment. Those human development goals are not going to be achieved. We are far from achieving them — in fact, we have regressed. To give the United Nations human development goals a simpler name. I would call them social and environmental justice.
Humankind will not achieve social justice by 2030. because what has been sown on our planet is injustice. What we have seen happening in the past few years is injustice, the injustice of turning a vaccine against a deadly disease into a commodity by hoarding it in rich countries. Latin America — a mere 8 per cent of the world’s population — accounted for 26 per cent of coronavirus disease deaths. Who said that health must be a business and not a right? Millions of elderly people and millions generally died because the vaccine was a commodity and not a good of humankind. Those rich countries have failed to deliver on their own promise to finance climate change adaptation. They do not have $100 billion to give to countries to protect them from floods, storms and hurricanes, but they do have it to spend in a single day to enable Russians and Ukrainians to kill each other. At this point we do not need $100 billion — we need $3 trillion to overcome the climate crisis, and the bill is rising with every second that passes on Earth.
Injustice has been sown, and by arresting peasant farmers who grow cannabis and coca leaf instead of addressing the loneliness faced by the young in the countries with the greatest economic and military power in the history of humankind, those young people have turned to fentanyl, the drug of death. Those countries wanted a war against the drugs of choice of the rebellious youth who opposed the Viet Nam War. the hippies’ marijuana and LSD. They ended up leading their society to the drug of neoliberalism and competition, the drug of choice of Manhattan yuppies — cocaine — and locked up millions of blacks and Latinos in cold, privatized prisons. A million Latin Americans were murdered and democracies destroyed in our America. They never managed to jail the Manhattan yuppies, and now they are faced with the glorious result of drug prohibition, fentanyl, which kills not 4.000 but 100.000 young people a year in the United States.
Injustices were sown, with the worst of them all condemning humankind to war. That is why social justice in the world today is in such a bad state. The problem is that this was not a question of whether we might be socialists or progressives, but rather one of determining where the time left to live on the planet was going. As President of a land of beauty. I propose to the General Assembly that we do two simple things to make up for lost time — end the war and reform the global financial system. From the peace conferences on Ukraine and Palestine, we should go out and build the reform that we already discussed back there, in the Amazon jungle, where the largest river on Earth, which crosses the largest jungle on Earth, meets the sea. We have discussed it in Brasilia, and we have been to Kenya to join our brother peoples of black Africa, from whence we came at a time of another great injustice perpetrated by the powerful — slavery. We have been to Paris to see if crowds are still clamouring for liberty, equality and fraternity, and we have been to Washington to talk to the President and see if the peoples of North and South America might come together again, remembering that
in days of old. more than two centuries ago. we met in history to talk about liberty, equality, democracy and the Republic. And we have talked in every tone of voice about getting to the root of the problem of and resolving the climate crisis.
If fossil capitalism is not financed, it will die. Its death throes will be harsh, but that is necessary if humankind, nature and life are to continue to exist. Decarbonized capitalism will have to be financed — we already know that green capital will move only where there is profit. That is its law. and that framework for covering the decarbonization of the entire world is a narrow one. Those in Government and power who still believe that the climate crisis, the crisis of life itself, can be overcome with a few affordable credits are mistaken. In their delusion, they propose that countries of the Earth that are already over-indebted by disease and greed can acquire more credits in order to overcome a problem created solely by the smokestacks of the North. But the crisis of life, the mega-crisis, cannot be overcome by acquiring more debt.
The financing of life is the intravenous medicine that must be infused into the veins of the economies and societies of the world to tackle the challenge of leaving coal and oil under the earth, in their places, which are the true veins of the Earth, as Roberto Cobaria, a Colombian Uwa indigenous person, told the world 30 years ago. In his words, extracting oil is drawing blood from the Earth, and doing it will cause life to perish. Most of the investment in decarbonizing the world’s economy will come from public funds, from societal efforts, by bringing States together to bring humankind together — what is now known as multilateralism — to govern the Earth through the lens of democracy rather than the lens of empire. Empires excel not at saving life but at starting wars. The mega-crisis of life can be resolved through a democracy with global reach, a deeper democracy that should not hesitate to define States and societies and formulate a great Marshall Plan for the revitalization of the planet.
The market will help us somewhat, but we cannot ask a mechanism devoid of humanity for solutions to a problem that it created to begin with. Yes. private funds can help, but they will be limited by their own logic. It is public funds that will have to bear the brunt of the effort, and those funds are presently weakened by debt. The great battle of our generation, that of defending life for our children and grandchildren, can be fully financed only by the public sector, by all of us — freeing the public sector to save life. Many may not like it. but we must let the echo of the public, of the State, of humankind, of multilateralism resound once more — that is to say. let the word “change” resound because it will be crucial if we are to save life. Saving life requires an era of change, and it is urgent.
Today change is synonymous with life. Today, in order to live, young people of all colours must bear the standard of change, of transformation, of a new humankind. It is democracy, not authoritarianisms. that increasingly resembles Nazis. It is world democracy, it is planning, it is the power of States, this time facing not war but how to plan life. It entails planning the transition to a decarbonized economy and financing it. The decarbonized economy. I have no doubt, will be a more humane and just economy. That is why the President of the land of beauty proposes that we reform the global financial system, the International Monetary Fund and the multilateral banking system, end economic blockades and channel private equity funds. If the debt of all countries were reduced by paying what is owed to the lenders through the allocation of special drawing rights by the IMF. there would be a decrease in global public debt and a real increase in public budgets and funds. In that way. we would be able to finance a Marshall Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals and for social and environmental justice on the planet, a plan to overcome, mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, which is the crisis of life.
This would be to restore Keynes from oblivion. That wise old man. and other wise men before him. equally forgotten, had already said as much in the depth of their ideas. What a beautiful horizon amid the darkness and storms of today — a horizon that tastes of hope. The goals of life and justice can be reached on the path that leads to global democracy and the reassessment of the common good, achieved along a pathway that belongs to everyone. I want my baby grandchildren. Luna. Victoria and Luka, and my younger daughter. Antonella. to be able to live far from the apocalypse and the times of extinction. I want them to live in a time in which humans learned how to stop killing each other on the planet and. through the diversity of their cultures, succeeded in understanding each other and fulfilling their mission to spread the virus of life among the stars of the universe.