Colombia, 2009

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.