Chile, 2010

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?