I come from
the South. At the conjunction of the Atlantic and the
River Plate, my country is a gentle, temperate plain
where livestock graze. Its history is one of ports, leather,
salted beef, wool and meat. There were dark decades of
lances and horses until finally, with the outset of the
twentieth century, we were at the forefront of social,
education and governmental affairs. I would say that
social democracy was invented in Uruguay.
For nearly 50 years, the world saw us as a kind of
Switzerland, but in reality in economic matters we were
the bastard children of the British Empire. When the
empire ended, we experienced the bitter and terrible
terms of trade and we yearned for the past for almost
50 years, remembering Maracaná. Today, we have
re-emerged in a globalized world, having learned from
our pain.
My personal story is that of a boy — because I
once was a boy — who like others wanted to change his
times and his world and dreamed of a free and classless
society. My mistakes were in part the results of my era.
Obviously I take responsibility for them, but sometimes
I cry: “If only I had the strength that I had when we
enjoyed such utopia!”
However, I do not look towards the past because
what we have today was created from the fertile ashes
of yesterday. On the contrary, I am not on this planet
to settle scores or to reminisce. I am greatly anguished
by the future that I will not see, and to which I have
committed myself. Yes, it is possible to have a world
with more humanity, but perhaps today the main task
is to save life.
I am from the South and I have come from the
South to this Assembly. I share with the thousands of
poor compatriots in cities, in the jungles, in the plains,
in the pampas and the canyons of Latin America the
common fatherland that we are creating. I bear upon
my shoulders the indigenous cultures, the remains
of colonialism in the Malvinas, and the futile and
regrettable blockades of Cuba under the Caribbean
sun. I also bear the consequences of the electronic
surveillance, which does nothing but create the distrust
that poisons us needlessly. I also come with a huge
social debt and with the need to defend the Amazon, the
seas, and our great rivers of America. I also have the
duty to fight for all on behalf of my fatherland and so
that Colombia can finally regain peace. I have the duty
to fight for tolerance for those who are different and
with whom we have differences and disagreements. We
do not need tolerance for those with whom we agree.
Tolerance is the foundation of peaceful coexistence,
understanding that we are all different in this world.
I fight against the illicit economy, drug trafficking,
theft, fraud, corruption — the contemporary scourges
unleashed by an opposite set of values and by those
who maintain that we are happier when we are richer,
no matter by what means. We have sacrificed the old,
immaterial gods and we are now occupying the temple
of the Market God. This god organizes our economy, our
politics, our habits and our lives, and even provides us
with rates and credit cards and the illusion of happiness.
It seems that we have been born only to consume, and
when we can no longer consume we are overcome by
frustration, poverty and self-loathing.
It is true that today, in order to spend and to bury
our garbage in what science calls the carbon footprint,
if in this world we aspired to consume like the average
American, we would need three planets in order to be
able to live. In other words, our civilization has mounted
a deceitful challenge, and as we go on it is not possible
for everyone to achieve that goal. Indeed, our culture is
increasinglt driven by accumulation and market forces.
We are promised a life of spending and squandering;
in fact, it is a countdown against nature and against
future humankind. It is a civilization against simplicity,
against sobriety, against all natural cycles; worse yet, it
is a civilization against freedom, which requires time to
experience human relationships and the most important
things: love, friendship, adventure, solidarity and
family. It is a civilization against free time that does
not pay, that cannot be bought and that allows us to
contemplate the beauty of nature.
We have destroyed the real jungles and sown
anonymous cement jungles. We have tackled a
sedentary lifestyle with walking, insomnia with pills,
solitude with electronics. Can we be happy when we
are so far from the human essence? We have to ask
ourselves this question. Stupefied, we have rejected our
own biological imperative, which defends life for life’s
sake as a superior cause, and we have replaced it by
functional consumerism and accumulation.
Politics, the eternal mother of all human
endeavours, has remained shackled to the economy
and to the marketplace.Going from one adventure to
another, politics achieves little more than perpetuating
itself, and as such it delegates its power and spends its
time bewildered, fighting for the Government. Out of
control, human history marches forward, buying and
selling everything and innovating in order to negotiate
what is, in a way, non-negotiable. Marketing exists for
everything: cemeteries and funeral services, maternity
wards, fathers, mothers, grandparents, uncles,
secretaries, cars and vacations. Everything is business.
Marketing campaigns deliberately target children and
psychologically influence older children to reserve
safe territory for the future. Abundant evidence exists
of such abominable uses of technology that sometimes
induce mass frustration.
The average city dweller wanders between financial
institutions and tedious office routines, sometimes
moderated by air conditioning. He often dreams about
vacations and freedom. He dreams about having the
ability to pay his bills until one day his heart stops and
he is gone. Other such soldiers will fall prey to the jaws
of the marketplace, sharing in material accumulation.
The crisis really rests in the powerlessness of
politics, which is incapable of understanding that
humankind cannot and will not escape nationalism,
which is practically etched into our DNA. Today, it is
time to fight to prepare a world without borders.
The globalized economy has no other driving force
except that of the private interests of the very few,
and each nation State seeks only to maintain its own
stability. Today, the great task for our peoples and our
humble way of seeing things becomes the be-all and
end-all. As if that were not enough, truly productive
capitalism is a prisoner of the banks, which are at the
summit of global power. More clearly, the world is
clamouring for global regulations that respect scientific
achievements, which abound, but it is not science that
governs the world.
Today, we need a lengthy agenda of definitions. We
must define working hours throughout the world. We
need to have convergence among currencies. We need
to finance the global struggle for water and against
desertification. We have to figure out how to recycle
more and how to counter global warming. What are the
limits of each human task?
We must achieve a broad planetary consensus to
unleash solidarity among the most oppressed and to
punish and tax waste and speculation by mobilizing the
large economies not to produce disposable goods, but
rather useful goods without planned obsolescence or
excess, which would help the world’s poorest peoples.
Useful goods could stand against world poverty. Turning
to a useful neo-Keynesianism on a global scale in order
to abolish the world’s most flagrant embarrassments
would be a thousand times more profitable than making
war.
Perhaps our world needs fewer global organizations,
organized forums and conferences, which serve only
to aid hotel chains and airlines; perhaps no one really
benefits from their decisions anyway. We must return
to what is old and eternal in human life, along with
science that strives to serve humankind, and not only
the rich. With scientists, the counsellors of humankind,
we can create agreements for the entire world. Neither
the large nation States nor transnational companies, not
to mention the financial system, ought to govern the
world of humanity. Yes, lofty politics combined with
scientific wisdom — it must come from science, which
is not attracted by material gain but looks towards the
future and tells us about things we may not foresee.
How many years ago did they tell us in Kyoto about
certain facts linked to climate change?
We have finally learned that intelligence must be
at the helm, guiding the ship to port. Actions of this
nature and others that we cannot name, yet which we
believe to be crucial, require life and not acquired
wealth. Obviously, we are not so naïve; these and other
things like that will not come to pass. Many pointless
sacrifices still lie ahead of us. We still must deal with
the consequences and not tackle the causes. Today, the
world is incapable of establishing global regulations for
the planet, due to the failure of lofty global politics,
which meddles with everything.
For a time, we were protected by more or less
regional agreements, established to create a deceitful
so-called free trade that in the end constructed
protectionist, supranational barriers in some regions
of the globe. In turn, important branches of industry
and services dedicated to saving and improving the
environment will arise. We will be comforted by that
for a while. We will be distracted.
But of course, the accumulation will continue
unabated, to the delight of the financial system. Wars
and fanaticism will continue until nature calls us to
account and makes our civilization non-viable. Perhaps
our vision is too crude, not compassionate enough,
and we view man as a unique creature, the only one on
Earth capable of acting against his own species.
I reiterate that what some call our planet’s ecological
crisis is the result of the overwhelming triumph of
human ambition. This is our triumph and our defeat,
given our political impotence to fit into the new era that
we have helped to build without realizing it.
Why do I say this? The numbers tell the story.
The truth is that the global population quadrupled and
gross domestic product grew by a factor of at least
20 over the past century. World trade has doubled
approximately every six years since 1990. We could
continue to list numbers that clearly establish the
march of globalization. What is happening to us?
We are entering a new era, and rapidly, but with our
political bodies, cultural accessories, parties and young
people all reduced to old age before the horrific and
accelerating changes that we cannot even grasp. We
cannot manage globalization because we do not think
globally. We do not know if this is a cultural limitation
or we are reaching biological limits.
The portents of revolution are present in our age
as in no other in the history of humankind, yet our age
does not have a conscious direction or even a basic
instinctive direction, and still less organized political
direction, because we do not have even the beginnings
of a philosophy with which to face the speed of
oncoming changes.
The greed that has been such a negative force and
such a driver of history has also pushed forward the
material, scientific and technical progress that has
made our era and our time what it is and has enabled a
phenomenal leap forward on many different fronts. At
the same time, this very tool — the greed that pushed us
to domesticate science and transform technology — is
paradoxically pushing us over the edge into a shadowy
abyss, towards an unknown fate, an era without history,
and we are left without eyes to see or the collective
intelligence to continue to colonize and transform
ourselves.
If there is one thing that defines this tiny little
human creature, it is that it is an anthropocentric
conqueror. It seems that things come alive and submit
to men. Glimpses of these things abound everywhere,
glimmers that should allow us to discern these things,
or at least make out the direction in which things are
headed, but it is clearly impossible to make collective,
global decisions about the big picture. Individual greed
easily triumphs over our species’ greed. Let us be clear.
What is the big picture of which we speak? It is the
system of global life on Earth, including human life,
with all the fragile balances that make it impossible for
us to continue as we are.
On the other hand — and this is less contentious and
more obvious — in the West in particular, because we
are indeed from the West, though we are also from the
South, the republics arose to make the claim that men
are equal, that no one is better than anyone else, and
that Governments should represent the common good,
justice and equity. Often, these republics become warped
and fall into the habit of ignoring ordinary people, the
man on the street, the common people. Republics were
not created to outgrow their constituents, but instead
are historical phenomena designed to function for their
own people. They must therefore answer to majority
and must fight for its interests.
As for the traces of feudalism that persist in
our societies, or the domineering classicism, or the
consumer culture that surrounds us all, in the course
of their existence republics often adopt a way of daily
life that excludes and holds at arm’s length the common
man. In fact, that common man should be the central
cause of the republic’s political struggle. Republican
Governments should increasingly look like their
respective peoples in the way they live and the way they
deal with life.
The fact is that we tend to cultivate feudal
anachronisms, spoiled affectations and hierarchical
distinctions that undermine the best feature of
republics — the fact that no one is better than anyone
else. The interaction of those factors and others keeps
us living in prehistory, and today it is impossible to
renounce war when politics fails. Thus, economies are
strangled and resources wasted. Every minute in the life
of our planet, we spend $2 million on military budgets
around the world — $2 million a minute. Medical
research on all manner of diseases, which has made
huge advances and is a blessing that promises longer
life, receives barely a fifth of what is budgeted for the
military. That process, from which we cannot escape,
perpetuates hatred, fanaticism and distrust, fuels new
wars and wastes fortunes.
I know that it is very easy politically to criticize
ourselves at the national level, and I think it naive
in this world to propose that resources that could be
saved and spent on other, useful things. Again, that
would be possible if we were capable of making global
agreements and working on global prevention and
world policies aimed at ensuring peace and offering
the weakest among us guarantees that do not exist.
Enormous resources would have to be cut to address
the most shameful things on Earth, but one question
suffices. Where can humankind as it is today go
without those guarantees? Thus, each wields arms
commensurate with his size.
And that is where we are today, because we can
barely reason as individuals, let alone as a species.
Global institutions, especially today, languish in the
shadow of the dissenting great nations. Clearly, such
nations wish to hold on to power. They block action
by the United Nations, which was created in the hope
and with a dream of peace for humankind. But what
is even worse is that they have cut it off from global
democracy. We are not all equal. We cannot be equal
in a world where some are strong and others weak. As
a result, our world democracy is wounded, and we face
the historical impossibility of reaching a global peace
agreement. We patch up diseases when an outbreak
occurs as one or other of the great Powers wishes, while
we look on from afar.
It would be difficult to invent a force that is worse
than the chauvinistic nationalism of the great Powers.
Nationalism, a force that liberates the weak through
the process of decolonization, has become a tool of
oppression in the hands of the strong. The past two
centuries are full of examples. The United Nations is
languishing and becoming increasingly bureaucratic
from lack of power and autonomy, above all of
recognition of democracy for the weak of the world,
who are the majority.
By way of a very small example, our little country
is in absolute terms the largest Latin American
contributor of soldiers to peacebuilding missions,
and we go wherever we are asked to go. But we are
small and weak, and in the places where resources are
distributed and decisions made, we cannot go even to
serve coffee. In our heart of hearts we long to help
humankind emerge from prehistory — and people who
live with war are still living in prehistory, despite the
many artifacts they can build — but as long as we do
not emerge from prehistory and retire war as a resort
when politics fails, that is the long march and challenge
we have ahead of us. We say that in full awareness; we
are familiar with the loneliness of war.
Such dreams, however, require us to fight for an
agenda of world agreements that can begin to steer our
history and overcome life’s threats, step by step. Our
species should have a Government for all humankind
that supersedes individualism and creates political
leaders who follow the path of science and not merely the
immediate interests of those governing and suffocating
us. At the same time, we must understand that the
world’s poor are not from Africa or Latin America;
they are all part of humankind, and that means that we
must help them to develop so they can lead decent lives.
The necessary resources exist. They can be found in the
waste of our predatory civilization.
A few days ago a tribute was delivered in a fire
station in California. An electric bulb had been turned
on for 100 years. It had been on for 100 years! How many
millions of dollars have they taken from our pockets
deliberately creating junk so that people will buy and
buy and buy? But globalization means a brutal cultural
change for our planet and for our life. That is what
history demands from us. The entire material basis has
changed and it has changed man. In our culture, we act
as if nothing had happened. Instead of us controlling
globalization, it controls us.
Almost 20 years ago, we discussed the humble
Tobin tax, which could not be applied at a global level.
All of the banks with financial power rose up against it.
Their private property and who knows how many other
things would be harmed. However, that is the paradox.
With talent and collective work, with science, step by
step humankind can make deserts green; humankind
can bring agriculture to the seas; humankind can
develop agriculture that lives with salt water.
If the power of humankind is focused on what is
essential, it is infinite. Here we see the greatest sources
of energy. What do we know about photosynthesis?
Almost nothing. There is a great deal of energy in
the world, if we work together to use it properly. It
is possible to eliminate poverty from the planet. It is
possible to create stability. It will be possible for future
generations, if they begin to reason as a species and
not just as individuals, to bring life to the galaxies and
pursue this dream of conquest that we, human beings,
have in our genes.
But if those dreams are to come true, we will have to
control ourselves or we will die. We will die because we
are not capable of being at the level of the civilization
that we have been developing with our efforts. That
is our dilemma. We should not spend our time merely
correcting the consequences. Let us consider the deep-
rooted causes, the civilization of waste, the present
civilization that is stealing time from human life and
wasting it on pointless matters.
Let us remember that human life is a miracle.
Consider that human life is a miracle, that we are
alive as a result of a miracle, and that nothing is more
important than life. Our biological duty is, above all, to
respect life, promote it, take care of it, reproduce it and
understand that the species is our being.