I wish to begin by conveying our heartfelt
congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your election
to guide the work of the General Assembly at its sixty-
fifth session. Your human and professional qualities are
a guarantee of success in the Assembly’s important
tasks.
I come to this rostrum as the representative of
Chile, a country that is far away on the map but that is
inhabited by a people that is close and that is in
solidarity and brotherhood; a country geographically
narrow but with a big and generous heart; a country
physically surrounded by an arid desert to the north,
majestic mountains to the east, a huge sea to the west
and the magnificent Antarctica to the south. Despite
that, it is a people with a permanent and steadfast
commitment and calling to integration in the world. It
is a country that like many others has experienced
division and discord among its children but that is
today fully united and reconciled; a country with a
fearless and earthy character but possessing
indomitable determination and valour; a country of
warriors and heroes but that has enjoyed uninterrupted
peace for 130 years. It is a young country but with age-
old institutions, and it views the present with
confidence and the future with optimism.
Chile is a country that today is living through
times that are historic and dramatic and offer enormous
opportunities. I say historic times because only five
days ago we commemorated our two-hundredth
anniversary of independence and opened the doors to
our third century of republican life. We did so as one
big family saluting the same flag, honouring the same
heroes and singing the same national anthem
irrespective of our political ideas, religious beliefs,
ethnic origin or economic situation.
But Chile is also living through dramatic times of
adversity and sadness. A few months ago our country
suffered one of the five worst earthquakes in human
history, followed by tidal waves on our coastlines. Five
hundred and twenty-one of our fellow citizens lost
their lives and many are still missing. More than
2 million Chileans were affected. Entire cities and
villages were demolished. Hundreds of hospitals,
clinics, bridges and ports are still unusable. One of
every three children — 1.25 million — were unable to
return to school because the schools had been
destroyed or badly damaged. Total losses amounted to
about $30 billion, equivalent to about 18 per cent of
our national product. Without doubt, it was the largest
catastrophe with the biggest damage ever suffered by
our country in the history of its 200 years of
independence.
But from those ruins rose a people united in
solidarity. After a mere 45 days all children and young
people had returned to school. In only 60 days we were
able to restore proper health-care services in the
affected areas. In only 90 days we had built more
emergency housing than we had built throughout our
country’s prior history. In 100 days we had entirely
restored connections, providing full or partial services
to airports, ports, roads, bridges — everything the
earthquake had destroyed. In 120 days our economy
had recovered the capacity to grow and create
employment with greater strength than ever.
Certainly, reconstruction has only just begun and
will require years of effort. But to that end we will
continue to work tirelessly until we have rebuilt the
last school, the last hospital or the last home that had
been destroyed. Because for a country such as Chile,
which has been shaped by adversity, determination and
hard work, however difficult a crisis may be or how
painful its consequences, it always represents an
opportunity — the opportunity to build a better country
together.
In addition to being historic and dramatic, these
are times of enormous opportunities. That is because
this generation of Chileans — the bicentennial
generation — is in position to fulfil the dream our
parents and grandparents had always cherished but
never achieved. That dream is to succeed in making
Chile, before the end of this decade, a country able to
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defeat poverty, to defeat underdevelopment and to
create opportunities for material and spiritual
development for all of its children, which Chile has
never before known.
How will we do this? First, by strengthening the
three basic pillars so that development germinates and
opportunities flourish. At the political level that
requires a stable, participatory, transparent and vital
democracy; at the economic level, a social market
economy open to the world and trusting unreservedly
in the economic entrepreneurship and creativity of its
citizens; and at the social level, a State that is strong
and effective in the fight against poverty and in
promoting greater equality of opportunities.
But we will build upon rock, and not upon sand.
What was done before is insufficient. We must
strengthen the pillars of society, knowledge and
information. I am thinking about the development of
our human capital, which is the greatest wealth we
possess. We must encourage innovation and
entrepreneurship, which are the only truly renewable
and inexhaustible natural resources that we have. We
must invest in science and technology, which will
create unimaginable opportunities for the future we all
face, and we must promote more dynamic and flexible
markets and institutions in order to confront the
changes and opportunities that have become the
challenges of the modern world.
For those reasons, almost 65 years ago, Chile,
together with 50 other countries, attended the
formation of this United Nations, whose goal was to
maintain peace, security and international cooperation.
That was the post-war period, when our planet was
crossed and divided by two walls. One was the iron
curtain running from north to south, dividing the world
for a long time into two irreconcilable blocs, each with
sufficient war-making capacity to annihilate our planet
several times over. But there was another wall, the one
running from east to west, which separated the rich and
prosperous countries of the North from the poor and
underdeveloped nations of the South.
Both walls fell before our eyes as the sun set on
the twentieth century. The first wall was in Berlin, in
Central Europe, and the second one in Silicon Valley,
Bangalore, Singapore, New Zealand and in the main
technological centres throughout the world. But the fall
of these walls uncovered a third wall, less visible than
the previous ones but equally or more harmful and
damaging. That wall has existed in our countries and
peoples forever, separating the older souls who live in
nostalgia and fear the future from the young souls who
are creative and entrepreneurial and embrace the future
fearlessly and always believe that the best is still to
come.
That wall prevented many of our nations from
joining the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth
century. That explains why there are still
underdeveloped countries while others, fewer in
number, managed to demolish that wall in time and to
join that revolution.
But today we are confronted by a new revolution,
more powerful and more significant than the Industrial
Revolution: the revolution of knowledge, technology
and the information society. It has been knocking at
our doors for several years. It will be very generous to
the countries that want to embrace it, but tremendously
indifferent and even cruel to those that ignore it or
simply let it pass. And in order to deepen our
integration and to govern globalization better — lest
globalization should end up governing us — the crisis
must be addressed differently.
The financial crisis has ceased to be a national
problem and has acquired regional and often global
implications. The evils of modern society such as
terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime know
no frontiers or territories or jurisdictions. And any
attempts to effectively tackle global warming, natural
disasters, health emergencies, hunger or extreme
poverty are going to require action that is much more
attentive, concerted and effective on the part of the
community of nations.
So the United Nations and other institutions
deriving from the Bretton Woods consensus, such as
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
urgently need to modernize and adapt to the new times
if they want to play a leading role and not be mere
spectators of events to which we will be witnesses and
principal actors. Those new times are the changes
already taking place in this new century.
As in 1945, when Chile participated in the
creation of this Organization, and with the authority
conferred on us by the fact of having actively
participated in each one of its forums — peacekeeping
operations and humanitarian missions — today we also
want to participate in encouraging and promoting the
great reform and modernization that the United Nations
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and the international order require. That must be done
by creating a much more demanding and efficient
institution in terms of goals and expectations, one more
flexible and effective in structure and more determined
and committed in the defence of the ideals for which it
was created.
In other words, we need a United Nations able to
meet the challenges and needs of the twenty-first
century, which we all know are genuine peace,
sustainable progress and respect for the dignity of all
those who inhabit our planet. Such reforms require
modernizing the Security Council so that it is more
pluralistic and representative of the new global reality.
In this regard, we reiterate our appeal for the
incorporation of other emerging countries, such as
Brazil, on our own continent.
I should also like to take this opportunity to offer
my very sincere congratulations to my predecessor as
President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, on her recent
appointment as Under-Secretary-General for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and to
express my pride and that of my whole nation at the
fact that a compatriot will be head of a global effort to
achieve greater equality between men and women. I am
sure that, given her human and professional qualities,
she will lead the new gender entity brilliantly and
effectively.
I also wish to reaffirm our commitment to the
principles that have always governed and guided our
foreign policy, including full respect for international
law, the inviolability of treaties, the juridical equality
of States, the peaceful settlement of disputes and the
self-determination of peoples, which are unquestionably
essential foundations of international stability and
peaceful coexistence among nations.
I also stress the importance of the promotion of
democracy and respect for human rights at all times, in
all places and in all circumstances, and our lasting
commitment to multilateralism and open regionalism
that promote constructive and more cooperative
economic practices among the countries of the world
and of our region. Chile will never cease to raise its
voice in all international gatherings and forums to
defend these principles.
Here at the United Nations today, I also wish to
sincerely recognize the aboriginal peoples who
inhabited our lands thousands of years before the
European explorers and conquistadors arrived. We are
very proud to be a multicultural nation, but we
recognize that we failed for centuries to give our
aboriginal peoples the opportunities they deserved and
needed. That is why we in Chile are promoting the
constitutional recognition of all our aboriginal peoples,
abandoning the strategy of assimilation and moving
towards that of integration. Such a strategy respects,
values and protects their languages, culture and
traditions, which are part of our deepest national
wealth. Along with this constitutional recognition, we
have established a dialogue involving the Government,
civil society and our aboriginal peoples, in particular
the Mapuche, to strengthen the agenda for historic
rediscovery with the most powerful initiative ever
launched in Chile on this subject — the Araucanía
Plan.
I would also like to recall that only weeks ago my
country was shaken by an event heard around the
world. A rockslide of more than 100 million tons left
33 miners trapped deep under a mountain in the
Atacama desert. From that moment, our Government
and country committed themselves body and soul and
made their very best efforts to launch a search-and-
rescue operation. Seventeen anguishing days later, we
were able to reach the trapped miners. They sent up a
message that filled all my compatriots’ hearts with joy:
“We are okay, we are safe, the 33”. This represents the
whole paradox of our country. We have struggled so
hard to save the lives of the 33 miners, and yet at the
same time we have 34 Mapuche herders who are on a
hunger strike that is killing them.
I wish to conclude by telling those assembled
here that the example of courage and perseverance set
by our 33 miners will light the path to the future. The
future is always an adventure. For pessimists, it means
fear; for sceptics, it means doubt; but for all men and
women of good will, it always means challenges and
opportunities that we must meet together in order to
build a better world than the one we inherited from our
parents, and which we have a duty to bequeath to our
children. That challenge, my friends, is for us, and it is
now, because if it is not now, when, and if not for us,
then for whom?