At this general debate of the sixty-sixth
session of the General Assembly, I convey to the
Assembly a Christian, socialist greeting of solidarity
from the people of Nicaragua and Comrade President
Commander Daniel Ortega Saavedra. We trust that our
work will contribute to strengthening the Organization
through an appropriate focus on its purposes, principles
and possible contributions so that we can successfully
deal with the challenges before us as a community of
States, peoples and nations.
One year ago, during our discussions at the sixty-
fifth session of the General Assembly, we extensively
addressed the serious and multifaceted international
crisis experienced by humankind. At that time we
called it an apocalyptical crisis. One year later, the
evolution of world events has confirmed our
profoundest fears that our civilization is now at a
critical stage and that peace between States and
peoples is dangerously at risk.
Expectations that the international economic and
financial situation would improve have dissipated
before the relentless reality of a profound crisis; its
gravest effects still continue to affect deeply our
peoples. The international financial system, which is
controlled by speculators, again plunged into a tailspin.
The measures taken have had a temporary, non-lasting
effect owing to the ever increasing greed of bankers.
We are now witnessing the effects of the United States
internal debt problem, which has generated great losses
in most exchange markets.
At present, as before, we affirm that we reject the
language of war between peoples and we reject war as
a means to resolve conflicts between States. In the light
of the events in the brotherly Arab socialist popular
republic of Libya, we reiterate our declaration of
principle and express our solidarity with the brotherly
Libyan people.
The blunt and shameful manipulation of Security
Council resolution 1973 (2011) regarding Libya — the
illegal war being carried out by NATO members — is
the most recent example of the pathological need of
particular States to attempt to subordinate the peoples
of the world at any cost. It is the most recent example
of attacks against the sovereignty of a State Member of
the United Nations in violation of the Charter of the
United Nations.
Nicaragua expresses its firmest rejection of the
use of the misnamed responsibility to protect in order
to intervene in our countries, bomb civilians and
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change free and sovereign governments. We cannot
allow the imposition of this new model of imperialist
aggression nor the continued aggression against our
peoples. Interference and intervention will not resolve
crises; only dialogue and negotiation among brothers
and sisters will resolve political crises among peoples.
The unacceptable policy of double standards has
become a constant of those Powers, which clearly
aspire to hegemony. Where are those countries, the
supposed defenders of oppressed peoples, the self-
proclaimed civilian protection apostles, when an
attempt is being made to recognize the inalienable
rights of the Palestinian people, their right to live in
peace, their right to a sovereign State enjoying full
recognition as a State Member of the United Nations?
This is clearly an instance of double morals, double
standards. After six decades of conflict, the Palestinian
people are now to be denied their right to a State, while
a mere 10 days ago, with unheard of haste and, I must
note, a certain irony, the General Assembly recognized
a transitional council that has not yet formed a
Government.
We reject the logic of denying the very existence
of a Palestinian State. From the moment of triumph of
our revolution in 1979 — the Sandinista revolution —
Nicaragua has been a proud witness to the noble
struggle of the Palestinian people and their substantial
concessions aimed at achieving peace.
Before the General Assembly, Nicaragua ratifies
its recognition of the Palestinian State within its 1967
borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. We call, here
and now, for the proclamation of Palestine as the
194th State Member of the United Nations.
Recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian
people can only serve to promote Middle East peace
and stability. At present, more than ever, such
recognition must become a reality. Clearly, Palestine’s
right is linked to the existence of the State of Israel, a
State we recognize in juridical and political terms. May
both States exist, so that both peoples may live in
peace and work for their well-being and development:
That is the universal appeal.
Resolutions adopted by the General Assembly for
more than two decades have demanded an end to the
United States of America’s economic embargo against
Cuba. They must be fully implemented. Despite
expectations, the facts confirm that nothing has
changed. Sanctions against Cuba remain intact and are
rigorously implemented. That criminal blockade
violates international law; it is contrary to the purposes
and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and
constitutes a crime against a sovereign State’s right to
peace, development and security. In its essence and its
objectives, it is an act of unilateral aggression and a
permanent threat to a country’s stability.
Despite that criminal blockade, Cuba continues
daily to strengthen its solidarity and fraternal relations
with all peoples of the world. Cuba’s armies of white
coats and educators are ever more numerous in
demonstrating their country’s solidarity. We also echo
the call for an end to the injustice against the five
Cuban heroes who have been unjustly imprisoned for
13 years as of this past 12 September, for having
alerted their people to the activities of terrorist
organizations against Cuba.
As unlikely as it may seem, the process of
decolonization has not ended, and there remain entire
peoples who have been denied their right to
independence and self determination. We welcome and
maintain our solidarity with the peoples of Puerto Rico,
the Western Sahara and the struggle of the Frente
Polisario and with Argentina with regard to the
occupation of the Malvinas Islands.
Observations made in the Assembly in 2010
regarding the need to achieve a balance between
human beings and Mother Earth remain relevant; they
have even led us to conclude that, far from
diminishing, pressures on the planet have increased;
threats have escalated and real and potential dangers
have multiplied.
Among those, the Fukushima disaster in Japan
had the virtue of bringing into view the chilling global
risk of radiation. The Japanese crisis has rightly been
described as a nuclear war without war. Its present and
future repercussions, which have not yet been fully
established, are considered by recognized scientists to
be more serious than those of the Chernobyl disaster.
While expressing our solidarity with the
Government and the heroic people of Japan — the
victims of the earthquake that levelled their territory
and those affected by the Fukushima accident — we
vehemently call on States with nuclear reactor
installations to take all measures to avoid similar
accidents that would gravely endanger people’s health
and would harm the environment.
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The upcoming Durban Climate Change
Conference and the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable
Development will provide renewed opportunities —
which we must not allow ourselves to squander — to
truly break with destructive logic and redirect
humankind towards development that is in harmony
with Mother Earth and respectful of the lives of the 7
billion human beings now populating the planet.
We all know that we have been incapable of
achieving an accord on climate change. Although the
sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
established a Green Fund and called for the
mobilization of financing for developing countries, that
accord is far from addressing the serious damage being
done to the environment and Mother Earth or the
historical responsibility of the developed countries,
which are bent on dealing a final blow to the Kyoto
Protocol so as to continue their uncontrolled emissions
of greenhouse effect gases.
In Rio and in Durban we will be called upon to
renew our political will and adopt genuine, concrete
commitments based on previous progress and
commitments. The issue is of transcendental
importance for our planet and for human beings.
Development must not sacrifice life. We recall that the
Universal Declaration on the Common Well-Being of
Mother Earth and of humankind is an essential guide
for our debates and actions.
Looking at other issues, Nicaragua salutes the
international community’s invitation to Taiwan to
participate in the assemblies of United Nations
specialized agencies directly related to the well-being
of the 23 million Taiwanese. We urge other
international forums to adopt similar positions.
The global economic and financial crisis has
compounded the already serious food crisis, primarily
in impoverished countries. We know that this crisis
also has structural causes in the present capitalist
development model — a model that discourages
internal production and impedes technology transfer to
the agricultural sector of impoverished countries, a
model without available credit or technical training for
small and medium producers, which results in
production difficulties.
Climate change has become an additional major
factor in the deepening of the food crisis. The trend
towards higher oil prices at the international level has
caused some countries with an agricultural base to
begin producing biofuel. That phenomenon has
significantly changed food supply and demand and has
reinforced the trend toward higher prices.
From the ethical point of view, as well as
political, economic and social, it is essential to take
immediate concerted action to avoid the continuing
increase in the number of hungry people and to
develop sustainable policies for guaranteeing food
security worldwide.
We renew our commitment to the cause of
general and complete disarmament. It is imperative
that we establish peace on Earth and provide the
7 billion human beings who inhabit it, and Mother
Earth itself, with the opportunity to survive the
destructive tendencies promoted by the dominant
economic model, so that humankind may develop in an
environment conducive to manifesting our enormous
spiritual and material capacities. No other way will
enable us to achieve a better future.
It is therefore unjustifiable and unacceptable that
the present world continues to spend more on the
development and testing of all types of weapons and
less on protecting the life and development of human
beings. While millions of persons suffer the effects of
the economic and financial crisis, global military
expenditures have skyrocketed. Over the past 10 years,
those expenditures have increased by 50 per cent, to
$1.5 trillion today. More than 8 million small arms and
light weapons and more than 16 billion munitions are
produced every year, the equivalent to more than
2.5 munitions for every single person on the planet.
That arms proliferation causes irreparable direct and
indirect harm to peoples and their economies.
We can end that proliferation if we decide to. It is
not true that the arms sector is vitally important to the
world economy. In fact, despite what the producers of
small arms and light weapons would have us believe,
their trade and the trade in munitions and components
represent less than 0.01 per cent of the world’s
industrial transactions.
We are firmly convinced that because the Korean
peninsula remains a focal point of international
tension, any solution must take place through goodwill
and sincere dialogue between the parties in order to
maintain peace and stability.
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The factors called new threats to security have
become an outright scourge for most of our countries.
Drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal arms
trafficking, and the trafficking of immigrants, among
others, constitute ethical, political and economic
challenges for Central America, which is stigmatized
today in some international reports as one of the most
violent regions on Earth. That stigmatization is
deliberate and carries serious consequences for our
countries. It transforms us into protagonists of the
problem rather than the victims we truly are, victims of
the lucrative businesses that constitute those new
threats. Through transnational networks they utilize our
territories as a bridge from South to North and from
North to South, in a dance of millionaires as thousands
of people are assassinated along illegal routes and
porous borders.
The International Conference of Support for the
Central American Security Strategy, held in Guatemala
last June, exposed the seriousness of a situation that
exists not only in our region, but in all of the countries
of the world. That is why the principle of shared but
differentiated and proportional responsibility must
guide mutual commitments. It is urgent that we move
in the right direction before it is too late for us all.
Nicaragua is going through a time of change
aimed at reversing the negative effects of 16 long years
under neoliberal Governments. We are recovering
values, restoring rights, strengthening capacities and
constructing a new model based on replacing the
neoliberal model of untrammeled capitalism with one
based on Christian, socialist and solidarity principles.
We are articulating popular democracy through the
national human development plan. Together these
constitute the backbone of a new phase of the
Sandinista revolution.
These achievements are due in large part to
Nicaragua’s integration into the Bolivarian Alliance for
the Peoples of Our Americas, an initiative stemming
from the genius of Fidel Castro, the Commander in
Chief of the Cuban revolution, and of Commander-
President Hugo Chávez Frías. This brotherhood,
unique in today’s world, enables solidarity,
complementarity and fair trade between our peoples
and advances the historical cultural unity of our
peoples.
At the same time, our national human
development plan is aimed specifically at promoting
the country’s economic and social health by adding
jobs and reducing poverty and inequality, on a basis of
sovereignty, security and integration. The restoration of
the human and constitutional right of all Nicaraguans
to free education is reflected in the fact that, in a
country with a total population of 6.5 million,
1,821,682 students are now enrolled in schools. This
year we are launching the battle for universal primary
education, aiming at universal sixth grade education by
2012. The goal is to achieve universal enrolment in the
third year of secondary school by 2015.
The restoration of the human and constitutional
right of the Nicaraguan people to free health care
means providing better access to, and improving the
quality of, health services, reducing maternal and
infant mortality, paying more attention to the
development of young people, expanding community
family health services, and the first large-scale
registering of people with disabilities. Our Programa
Amor is designed for boys and girls under six years old
and for street children and adolescents, and those who
work during school terms, in order to restore to them
their fundamental rights.
In structural areas, we are making progress in
transforming the energy matrix so that by 2017, 90 per
cent of energy will be from renewable sources and
10 per cent from fossil fuels, radically inverting the
pyramid we inherited in 2006. We are enjoying
macroeconomic stability, with gross national product
growth projected at 4 per cent or more. Our
improvement policies have increased direct foreign
investment in our country’s strategic sectors. We have
had outstanding successes in confronting drug
trafficking and transnational organized crime.
Nicaragua is now recognized as one of the safest
countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the
safest in Central America. We have had indisputable
successes in reducing poverty and inequality, as has
been recognized by international financial institutions.
We are fervent supporters of the integration and
unity of Central America, Latin America and the
Caribbean. Within the framework of the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, we are
securing our model through complementarity,
investments, fair trade and solidarity.
With our neighbours and brothers in Honduras
and El Salvador, we are working together for the
sustainable development of the Gulf of Fonseca.
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Comrade President Daniel Ortega Saavedra has also
made several approaches to the Government and
people of our neighbour to the south, Costa Rica,
concerning the possibility of joint development of our
common border, particularly in terms of protecting and
restoring the environment and working on sustainable
economic and social development for the benefit of
both our peoples. Throughout this process, young
people and women have been at the forefront of the
direct democracy model that is the essence and
continuity of the Sandinista revolution.
Nicaragua can demonstrate the profound,
concrete and verifiable economic, social, political,
legislative and cultural achievements our people are
undergoing. In the context of the serious crises that so
many countries, developed and developing, are going
through, our Christian, socialist, solidarity model is an
inspiration for an ever better future.
We are aware of our difficulties and limitations.
We know that the weight of the historical structure that
we inherited is still a liability that we must cast off in
our national development process. The burdens of
poverty and underdevelopment require sound policies
and sustained effort and political and governing
systems that have the necessary commitment to our
people’s aspirations. I can assure the Assembly that
through our Government of national reconciliation and
unity we will achieve that and more.
As we have said before, it is not easy for
developing countries such as ours to deal with an issue
of the breadth and depth of the global economic and
financial crisis. We have yet to recover from the harsh
effects of the last wave, while the new threat of another
and greater crisis is bearing down on us. According to
the International Monetary Fund, Central America’s
response to the previous world economic and financial
crisis was in large part successful. We were able to deal
with the situation successfully — success with costs
that in Nicaragua’s case were not passed on to the
poorest, because the measures we adopted were based
on the interests of our country as a whole.
As we consider international developments, we
must also turn our attention to our own Organization.
Global democratization must be accompanied by
democratization of the United Nations without further
delay.
In his book La reinvención de la ONU: una
propuesta, our comrade and friend, the former
President of the Assembly, General Father Miguel
d’Escoto Brockmann — who is with us here — states
that it is urgent that we give true meaning to
democracy and independence in the United Nations, so
that the opinions of all can be heard and so that those
opinions really count in the decision-making process,
with no one being excluded.
This proposal, adopted by our national
reconciliation and unity Government, consists of
proposals on the United Nations charter, the statute of
the International Court of Justice and the statute for the
International Tribunal for Climate Justice and
Environmental Protection, as well as a proposal on a
draft universal declaration on the common good of
mother earth and humankind.
Reinvention and re-grounding are key concepts
that will pave the way for an international system
based on genuine multilateralism that is in harmony
with the changes the world has undergone during the
past few decades. We must restore a true political
dimension to international law and to the rights of
people.
Developed societies are sinking into the despair
caused by unemployment, the lack of social security,
financial insolvency, the implosion of established
labour rights and an uncertain future. Global Powers
are waging wars of aggression with no moral or
political base, causing material destruction and
enormous human suffering. Economic and financial
recovery are nowhere in sight; on the contrary,
specialists foresee a recession even more serious than
the one we have recently experienced.
Where do we find the solution we so urgently
need? Where do we regain hope in the possibility of a
different present and future world, in which there is
peace between States and nations? In which
development efforts and impressive scientific and
technological advances are equitably shared? In which,
as the Greek sophist Protagoras put it, man is the
measure of all things?
According to many prominent thinkers on the
global reality, the final crisis of the capitalist
development model has arrived. There is no time for
reforms. As Leonardo Boff has said,
“We need to find another way of thinking, one
based on principles and values that can sustain a
new test of civilization. If not, we will have to
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accept a path that leads straight to the edge of the
precipice. Dinosaurs already took that path.”
Nicaragua is proceeding on the belief that a better
future is possible if only we are capable of steering in a
new direction, if we struggle for justice and peace, and
if we commit ourselves to the development and
defence of the common good of the Earth and of
humankind.