I
would like to congratulate the President of the General
Assembly and reiterate to the United Nations our
gratitude for its positive presence and cooperation with
the Colombian people.
The Government over which I preside aims to
enhance the confidence of the national and
international community in Colombia. This quest for
confidence is based on three pillars: security with
democratic values, the promotion of investment and
entrepreneurship with social responsibility, and social
cohesion with freedoms.
We continue with our security advances, but also
there are some outstanding challenges. I would like to
highlight some intangible achievements that attest to
the democratic credentials of our security project.
We have recovered two monopolies that we
should never have lost: the monopoly of institutional
forces to fight criminals and the monopoly of justice
that the terrorists tried to dislodge. We have dismantled
paramilitarism, a term that emerged to describe private
criminal gangs whose objective was to fight drug-
trafficking guerrillas. Today, the State is the only entity
that fights all those criminals. Those criminals in all
their forms — narco-guerrillas, criminal gangs — are
part of a mafia-type relationship that unites them or
pits them against each other to distribute or fight over
the gains of the criminal drug business.
Justice, with the Supreme Court that was attacked
in 1985 by drug traffickers and guerrillas; justice,
which was tormented by the threats to and
assassination of judges and was dislodged in many
regions by the terrorists leaders of guerrillas and
paramilitary groups that attempted to replace it; justice
has, throughout the entire country, regained its full
effectiveness.
Victims did not complain out of fear of retaliation
or because they thought it was pointless. Now, thanks
to the recovery of our security, we have registered
239,758 victims, whose situations we are determined to
remedy, a remedy that is never complete but which will
lead little by little to reconciliation by overcoming of
the spirit of vengeance and hatred.
We have regained the independence of
decentralization and of political exercise. Terrorism
had displaced 30 per cent of our mayors, stolen and
corrupted municipal and departmental budgets and
exercised coercion within the public sector. Mayors
have regained their security so that they may freely
carry out their duties and transparently manage their
resources. Politics is now expressed freely in all
spectrums of thought. This terrorist threat has been
tackled without martial law, with full civil and political
guarantees and absolute respect for the freedom that we
promote with security.
We are working to improve the effectiveness of
our public forces as well as respect for human rights.
We do not hesitate to punish those who violate them,
but neither do we refrain from defending our soldiers
and policemen who sometimes have been victims of a
dirty legal war. Colombia has voluntarily presented
itself to a United Nations human rights review.
Furthermore, despite the suffering caused by
landmines that had been planted by terrorist groups, the
State destroyed those that were used by its public
forces for training purposes. Our country is one of the
leaders of the Ottawa Convention to destroy these
landmines and will host the next meeting of States
parties in Cartagena.
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We tackle terrorism with the utmost
determination, and we practise democracy fervently.
That is why the doors of Colombia have been open
without restriction to international vigilance. We
deliberate and disagree, but both impartial observers
and biased critics have had complete freedom to
express themselves in Colombia.
Our interest does not lie in the fanatical
confrontation between left and right, which is as
dangerous as it is obsolete. Rather, we are betting on a
modern democracy, a democracy that is safe and free,
that builds social cohesion, a democracy with
independent institutions and with confidence that stems
from the transparency that is based on a high level of
civic participation.
We have not been able to completely overcome
the problem of displacement, but we have increased
our budget twelvefold to help displaced persons. We
promote trust between public forces and communities
so that those who fight drug trafficking are not
thwarted by the displacement that is caused by drug
traffickers.
We have demobilized 51,783 members of terrorist
groups, whose numbers have dropped from around
60,000 to fewer than 8,000. We have been extremely
generous with those who have been demobilized and
extremely severe with the 7 per cent who have returned
to crime. The Justice and Peace Law, which covers
them, made it possible to report 29,555 criminal acts,
12,104 confessions, the discovery of 2,043 graves with
2,492 corpses, the identification of 708 bodies and the
return of 581 to their families. The participation of
victims and new procedures for restitution and
restoration of their rights are a decisive component of
this demobilization process.
Terrorism cannot be ignored in the name of good
international relations. To the contrary, multilateralism
and diplomacy must lead to collaborative action among
States to overcome this tragedy and its corollaries,
including arms trafficking, illicit drugs, money and
asset laundering and terrorist havens.
We reaffirm our commitment to multilateralism in
all its legitimate expressions, from organizations of
neighbouring countries to the most global
Organization, but we believe that multilateralism must
demonstrate that it is effective in defeating
international crime.
Colombia has acknowledged its internal problem
of narco-terrorism. We have carried out a heroic
struggle that will ultimately prevail. We cooperate with
the international community and we ask for more
effective cooperation. We are cooperating with Mexico,
Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Haiti, the Dominican
Republic, Peru, Afghanistan and other countries. We
acknowledge the efforts of the United States to work
together with us to make progress in dismantling
narco-terrorism. We request greater cooperation from
more countries and from the international community.
Our objective is to restore domestic security and never
to participate in the arms race for the bloody game of
international warfare. Our tradition is one of respect
for the global community.
We are concerned that, instead of progress
towards greater cooperation to ensure the security,
peace and tranquillity of the citizens of all countries,
there is an acceleration of the arms race. Some justify
it by citing the need to modernize their military
equipment, while others admit their desire for war.
Multilateral agencies, led by the United Nations,
must strengthen their action so that Governments will
fulfil their duty to protect their citizens and their
obligation not to attack the international community.
In Colombia, the only reason for terrorism is the
drug trade. Its violent criminals used to deny being
involved in narco-terrorism and to try to appear
ideological; today, having lost all sense of decency,
they cannot hide their criminal enterprise or feign
ideological postures, which are negated by their cruelty
towards their victims and those whom they have
kidnapped. The democratic transparency of our
country, which they tried to destroy, ensures that they
will never be acceptable.
We have a different view of co-responsibility and
of the proposal that drugs be legalized. The former
division between producer and consumer countries has
disappeared. Colombia began as a trafficking territory,
burst into production and now suffers as a consumer.
Those who began as consumers increase production.
All peoples are exposed to the risks of drug production,
trafficking and consumption. Co-responsibility must
thus be exercised in accordance with its real meaning:
a task that belongs to all of us, without any
reservations.
We believe that, instead of advocating the
legalization of drugs, we should consider the need to
15 09-52228
criminalize consumption. There is no consistency
between toughness when it comes to production and
trafficking and permissiveness when it comes to
consumption. That has led to deadly micro-trafficking
in cities, the promotion of consumption by adolescents
and young people and the involvement of children in
the criminal trade. We are making progress in the
constitutional process of criminalizing consumption,
taking care not to confuse the sick addict with the
criminal distributor.
Our Government is promoting investment and
entrepreneurship as ways to overcome poverty and
build equity. Colombia is moving forward in terms of
competitiveness and confidence. Investment must
perform a function of social responsibility to acquire
popular legitimacy in democratic societies. Social
responsibility — not speculation — is inseparable from
capital as a significant factor in social-wealth creation.
The economic crisis is a crisis of speculation, rather
than of creative free enterprise. We are confident that
the necessary conventions will be adopted to avoid the
risks created by speculative money transfers and
financial market speculation. We fear a new era of
protectionism and the selective closure of developed
economies, which would impede sustainable economic
recovery.
Social responsibility is inseparable from the fight
against climate change. Colombia is a net producer of
oxygen and emits insignificant amounts of carbon
dioxide. However, we are highly vulnerable, as shown
by the winter tragedies in recent years, which have
caused losses in terms of human life, production and
high service costs. We support tougher international
conventions to protect the environment. We hope that
the Copenhagen conference will produce effective
binding instruments so that it will not be another dead
letter.
Our main contribution to the fight against climate
change is the preservation of our 578,000-square-
kilometre rainforest, which constitutes more than
51 per cent of our national territory and the majority of
which lies along the Amazon. We have as a concrete
policy the forest ranger family programme, which has
involved more than 90,000 rural families in the
collective effort to protect the rainforest, keep it free
from the shadow of illicit drugs and ensure its recovery
where it has been destroyed. The State pays a bonus to
those families. The programme, supervised by the
United Nations, has received the highest rating from
the Organization.
In Colombia, forest ranger families protect the
Amazon rainforest from predatory drugs; elsewhere in
the world, a similar model could preserve trees in order
to mitigate climate change.
Clean energy, mass transportation systems and
the protection of water sources are essential actions in
our contribution to the fight against global warming.
Colombia, at more than 1 million litres per day, is the
second-largest Latin American producer of ethanol
from sugar cane and, at 1.8 million litres per day, the
largest producer of biodiesel from African palm. The
conditions in our country make it possible to increase
those outputs without destroying the rainforest or
limiting food security.
We have introduced incentives for other clean
energies such as solar and wind energy, the
development of which remains small despite their great
potential.
We are working on building nine mass
transportation systems in major cities and are now in
the process of incorporating another 10 that are
proportionally sized, with a view to replacing
individual transportation with collective transportation.
Eleven per cent of our national territory has been
designated a protected area. In natural sanctuaries such
as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which is the
highest coastal sanctuary in the world, agreements with
indigenous communities are being implemented. In
exchange for security, the recovery of lands and the
building of seven out of nine promised villages, they
have once again taken over the noble task of preserving
forests and water sources.
We gain nothing from security, investment,
health, education or any other social cohesion policy if
we do not attach equal importance to the environment.
We understand this in a “mega-diverse” nation that
contains 14 per cent of the planet’s diversity and ranks
second — behind Brazil — in terms of plant and
animal species and first in terms of amphibians and
birds.
Our fervent desire is to increase the Human
Opportunity Index in order to eliminate poverty, build
equity and guarantee every possible alternative for new
generations. We propose to include in the measuring of
the Index progress and setbacks in environmental
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policies. Opportunities are pointless without
environmental protection. Let us be effective in our
fight against climate change so that we do not condemn
the future inhabitants of the Earth to a planetary
holocaust.