But How Others See the United States: The Powerful Voice of the President of Colombia Gustavo Petro: His First Speech Before the United Nations in 2022

Recently elected president of Colombia Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States.  Petro’s major points concluded the following:

THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND PEOPLE

“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.”

BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE

“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.”

AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL NORTH

“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”

AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE

“Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”

AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

“These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries.”

THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION

“The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.

THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS EXPENDABLE

“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”

LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER

“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.

Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.

What Does All This Mean for Peace and Justice Activists

Peace and justice activists today must hear the voices of the world, including President Petro, We must oppose efforts of the traditional "great powers," particularly the United States, who seek to maintain their global hegemony in a rapidly changing world. We must oppose militarism around the world-bases, arms transfers, hybrid wars, covert operations, and cognitive wars. We must listen to our sisters and brothers from the Global South who seek a better world for themselves and others. We must endorse the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-civil, political, social, and economic. And specifically, we must oppose attacks on Venezuela and Colombia, sanctions against Cuba and over 30 other countries, and Israel's war on the Palestinian people. These are difficult tasks but as the massive mobilizations of recent times suggest, the people are ready.