Colombia, 2025

The Assembly will hear an address by His Excellency Gustavo Petro-Urrego, President of the Republic of Colombia. I request protocol to escort His Excellency and invite him to address the Assembly. President Petro-Urrego, this is my last statement as President here, the fourth time. In my first speech, I announced that it was very likely that there would be conflicts in Ukraine and in Palestine, and that I suggested that there be a peace conference. But those who don't have bombs or large budgets are not heeded here. Well, four years later, the horrific situation in Palestine did not lead me to think that almost the same thing could happen in the Colombian-Caribbean area, where unarmed young people are being shot at with missiles in the open seas. And now we are in a different situation. Perhaps it's more global, a kind of Stone Age that has descended on all of humankind against 17 unarmed young people in the Caribbean Sea, some of them Colombians. The persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants, missiles that have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza, the lack of action on the climate crisis. All this is linked, and all this has the same cause. Migration is simply an excuse so that a rich society, rich, white, and racist, believes itself to be the superior race and is not realizing that its leaders are leading it to the abyss, to its own distinction, together with the rest of humanity. They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking. That is a lie stated here in this very rostrum. In 2023 and 2024 were years when the largest amount of cocaine was seized, and over 700 drug traffickers were extradited to the United States and Europe. I extradited them, and my government seized, confiscated the cocaine, and we didn't shoot a single missile, nor did we kill any youths. The years where I was able to prove that it's more effective to substitute coca crops than forced eradication using poison, forcing peasants to use it. The violent war against drugs was a failure, and I replaced it with an effective anti-trafficking policy, not based on a mix-up between an inert substance, that is drugs, with people who actually use it and practice it. But what was necessary is to destroy dialogue and to shoot missiles. Was it really necessary on unarmed poor young people in the Caribbean? The anti-drug policy is not meant to stop cocaine that is coming to the United States. The anti-drug policy is to dominate the peoples of the South as a whole. You shouldn't look at the drugs, you should look at who has the power and who dominates. This is why I speak to you as a decertified president. I've been decertified by President Trump without him having any right to do this, a human right or divine right, or any sensible reason. They want to force, by violence, tens of thousands of peasants to do what the U.S. government wants to do, which are influenced by mafia groups in Colombia. Thousands of peasants are massacred in Colombia by politicians who were senators, who were presidents, who were ministers that were bribed and on the payroll of the drug mafia. And at the same time, they were allies of the extreme right based in Florida, the United States, and now allies of the Trump administration. They've been allied for decades with drug lords, cocaine drug lords in Colombia. They were allies and so they led this anti-drug policy from Washington. I don't know if Trump even knows that his foreign policy towards Colombia, Venezuela and towards the Caribbean is based on advice from Colombians who are allies of the cocaine mafia. I myself denounced these politicians, including the paramilitaries, drug traffickers, naming them by their names in the Congress of Colombia when I was senator. And many times they wanted to kill me because of that. And they did not want me to become president. They wanted me to shut up. And now they don't want another progressive government to be re-elected. That is why I've been personally decertified and they have spread calumny against Colombia. Colombia has confiscated the highest amount of cocaine in the history of the country under my government and I've been decertified. In Colombia we have managed to stop the increase in the rate of expansion of coca crops that was 43% under the government of Duque and has dropped to 3% and Duque was not decertified. He was someone who financed his campaign who was a drug trafficker and instead they've decertified me. So the anti-drug policy is not aimed at the public health of a society but rather to prop up a policy of domination. They don't want to give the power to the people. The young people that were killed using missiles in the Caribbean were not from Hamas. They were not from other terrorist groups. They were poor Colombians. And with apologies to those who dominate the United Nations, there should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump, that allowed the shooting of missiles against these young people who were simply trying to escape poverty. Youths in a speedboat who might have had a certain amount of drugs were not drug traffickers. They were simply poor youths. But the real drug traffickers live somewhere else, not in America, not in Latin America. So it's easy to shoot missiles against the speedboats with migrants and accusing them of terrorism and drug trafficking when they don't have a single weapon to defend themselves, when the real drug traffickers live in New York here, just a few blocks from here. In Miami. And they reach agreements with the DA. And they're allowed to traffic in Africa, in Russia, in China, but not in the United States, a country that has not managed to reduce its consumption of cocaine. Because it's drug addicts, or rather, they did manage to reduce the consumption of cocaine simply because their addicts switched to another type of drug, fentanyl, which is much deadlier. This fentanyl is produced in the industrial heartland of the United States here, not far from here. And the consumers are here as well. What's produced and consumed in the United States, that is the worst. They're addicted to fentanyl and to gasoline, the two main poisons of life in the world. Gasoline is even worse than fentanyl. Only the black-skinned people here, those who are ancestral here, that were thousands of years have been here, or young people, or women who don't want to see their children die of any color of their skin, the people are still hooked on fentanyl or hooked on television. Only they can stop this domination by the United States, the people who have taken to the streets in California, in New York, in Philadelphia, where the Liberty Bell stands, in spite of the National Guard that Trump sends out against its own people to shut them up to the states that are free. These states are no longer uniting their efforts in the face of tyranny. The President of the United States does not know that a million Latin Americans have died, the largest share of them from Colombia, and another million will die in North America in 10 years because of fentanyl. Cocaine killed 3,000 people a year. Today, fentanyl kills 130 per year, 30 times more. That is the outcome of 30 years by the United States of a policy that is absurd and that is leading its society to the horrific death due to drugs that kill the brain. In this situation, Trump not only allows missiles to be fired at young people in the Caribbean, does not only imprison migrants, but also allows missiles to be killed against children, women and old people in Gaza. He is an accomplice to genocide. It is a genocide and we need to prevent it. This forum is a mute witness to a genocide in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler. Here they don't speak of life, of the climate crisis. What is happening is the death of thousands of children. Meanwhile, we in Colombia have not increased the rate of killings. We have the lowest unemployment rate in the country this century. We have the lowest unemployment rates. We have developed our agriculture by 10% and our industry by 5%. We have more tourists than ever who have come to see the beauties of our country, our cultural and natural beauties, and we are seeking peace by negotiating with drug traffickers and with rebels. I will always be ready to discuss, to negotiate, to save lives and to eradicate coca crops, but based on their own voluntary decision by Colombian peasants. Let us not be bribed by the drug traffickers, as was the case in previous governments in Colombia. 25,000 hectares have already been eradicated voluntarily. We have been successful in this new policy. It's not an anti-drug policy, but an anti-drug traffickers policy. That is something different, and we are grateful to the countries that have helped us, such as Qatar, Cuba, Mexico, Vatican, Norway, Brazil, and Venezuela. We don't want to thank those who want to sow war between us. People of the world, listen. Latin America does not only mean drug trafficking or cocaine. Latin America has a massive, massive potential for clean electrical energy, renewable alternative energy based on wind, water. The United States has a huge demand for energy, and 70% of it is filled by fossil fuels, in other words, based on carbon, coal, gas. Latin America is developing its clean energy potential, and we can satisfy the entire demand of the United States for energy. What is necessary is investment, and we would make the biggest contribution to fighting climate change. Given the huge potential for clean energy and the capacity to absorb by the Amazon, Latin America can make a tremendous contribution to save the life in this planet. All that is necessary is $600 billion to develop this potential. Africa and Europe can do the same. This decarbonization would provide us with over a trillion, $1.3 trillion. This is money that is already in the treasuries of the United States, Europe, and China, but not a dollar is spent because it's not profitable, or rather, it might be profitable in terms of human life, including life in the United States, in Europe, and China. However, they don't want to depend on Latin America and Africa. They know that to bring together the clean energy of Africa and Latin America would not only decarbonize the planet, save it from the climate collapse, but it would also change the global power of which is discussed here, but that power is spoken in terms of bombs. This would truly create a global democracy and change the means of production because life and humanity would become the priorities, and they would edge out greed. Greed is the poison of life, and Mao spoke of this, Chairman Mao. According to science, we have 10 more years until we reach a point of no return in terms of the climate. Once we reach that point, we won't be able to do anything. We will simply observe the disasters, and we'll feel them in our own families and cities because it will be irreversible. The extinction of life, the extinction of human life, there'll be an irreversibility of the process, and no technology, no political or social force will be able to do anything about it to stop this collapse, and we only have 10 years left. That is what science tells us, but here, people don't believe in science. The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is the irrationality, and Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey of irrationalism in 1933, and today it's this country that is becoming irrational. The solution is to stop consuming fossil fuels and to quickly switch to water, wind, hydrogen, but the word decarbonization sounds subversive at the conferences of the most powerful countries, the G7 or G20, or Davos, among the rich. Just as five centuries ago, the word democracy sounded subversive here, or in Bogotá, in Paris, in Madrid. These dollars that I mentioned here, 600 billion or 1.3 trillion, this is just a little more than what the rich countries pledged at the COP in Paris, and they have not fulfilled their pledges because they are not interested in decarbonization, and what has come is basically loans from multilateral banks, which are just small amounts compared to what is needed. The climate crisis means that in all public budgets, investment in decarbonization and adaptation should be the priority. A global financial policy is necessary that is different. The debt risk premium should be abolished. Which countries are the riskiest? They are the countries that have the highest greenhouse gas emissions, such as this one. These are the riskiest countries, whereas the countries that absorb CO2, and we have jungles and a lot of water in the south, we absorb the CO2 of the north. But the market does not agree with that. So the debt of the poorest countries must be forgiven. There should be swaps, debt swaps, for adaptation and mitigation and investment in the climate crisis. So people from the United States and those from Wall Street, from London, you want to collect the interest payments from the debt of our countries. What you will find eventually is cemeteries, because we'll all be dead. The money will be useless in the midst of all the cemeteries. Another subversive word is the plan, global, a global plan. The word plan has been forgotten, because it was not necessary to plan, because to plan is anathema. And there was a fundamentalist belief in the markets, thinking that markets would bring happiness. The Swiss economist Aras said this, and in fact the market leads to an abyss, it leads to death, as we are already witnessing today. Malras, that was his name, was wrong. Neoliberalism was mistaken from the very beginning, and it's been guiding our countries for the past 50 years, based on completely erroneous formulas. The plan should be binding on national states. There should be a global democracy supervised by a security council that does not have the right to veto, because we have to understand that the market will not resolve the climate crisis, because it has produced that crisis. It was capital, which is based on unequal relationship between those who own the means that create the carbon and those who are salaried employees. This is a system that has to produce more and more objects that the boss, the owner, has to sell. And the same thing for the production of fossil fuels. That is what has produced the climate crisis, produce more to consume more, to sell more, and thus create more carbon, more oil, until we die. But this will not last forever, because carbon and fossil fuels have reached the end, because that is perhaps what will mean the end of capital in general, because if it's not the end of capital, it'll be the end of life. The owner of capital is an individual that has power. It's not a thing. It's not some kind of puppet. It is a human being with his greed, a slave to his greed. That is the individual who will seek to make sure that more and more oil is produced in their countries, even if it poisons his life, and continue to dig, to dig for more oil, even if it destroys the atmosphere and destroys life. So we have to choose either life or greed, either the Stone Age or local and global democracy. Freedom or death, as Bolivar said. And that was his slogan, his red and black, white and white banner. Freedom red, death black, and possible peace white. That is what is necessary as a revolution by the peoples of the world to overcome the climate crisis, and not to allow this crisis to reach a global collapse. It is a revolution of the United Peoples, of civilizations that need to engage in dialogue, more than states themselves. It is a revolution of entire humanity to save life on the planet, and perhaps with the cooperation of certain governments that want to support life. Today the United Nations is experiencing a crisis, and there's a need to transform it. Today we have nation-states gathered here who no longer have power, and that no matter how much they vote, they are ignored, because the nation-state has also reached its decadence, its ultimate fall, because capital has become global. It's not contained in a state. Socialism was supposed to be global, but Stalin, in fact, and Yalta condemned a global revolution that was occurring in Spain and in Greece, and it might have occurred in Latin America and other places. So humanity is a new political subject that has emerged, rather than the nation-state. And so the United Nations has to become a united humanity, even though a diverse but united humanity, a new subject is appearing in human history. This is very important, and I think that this is wonderful, because we have to overcome the idea of a nation-state to convert, to become humanity. But that humanity must be united. For that, there needs to be democracy around the world. There needs to be permanent dialogue in the midst of diversity. It is our differences that compels us to coordinate our actions at the global level. Dialogue, yes. Humanity, yes. Humanity profoundly democratic, yes. Hopefully, a humanity based on leaders who are free, rather than a humanity that is basically slaves, just a beast of burden. A humanity that shoots missiles against young people that are defenseless armed people, or shoots missiles in a place of the world near where Jesus was born. These problems cannot be resolved with governments who are bribed by oil producers, by oil corporations. So a new political subject is emerging, a united and diverse humanity, united despite its diverse cultures. Meanwhile, the old societies of Europe are collapsing, and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It's not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in Europe, in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants. It's stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves, whereas the majority of drug traffickers are blonde and have blue eyes, and they keep their fortunes in the largest banks in the world. They don't live in Bogota or in Gaza. They live in Miami. They are neighbors of President Trump. They live in Dubai or in Paris or London. They don't live where there's poverty. But the missiles are fired against those where there's poverty. Tren D'Aragua is a group that is considered a terrorist group, but that is not true. Migrants are not criminals. They should not be put in concentration camps, expelled and chained up. Immigration is due to a blockade against countries like Iraq or Cuba. Immigration is a result of the impoverishment of many countries because of their indebtedness, because of wars, wars unleashed by the United States and Europe to grab their oil. Immigration is a consequence of a climate crisis that leaves the tropics without water and destroys the environment. The solution to migration is very different from missiles or prisons or camps. There is no higher race. There is no supreme race. Only ignorant extremists think like that. All of humanity is made in God's image. They use immigration as a scapegoat to do nothing against the climate crisis, which will put an end to life. They use immigration to get the votes of the whites, but what is necessary is to put an end to the consumption of CO2 and oil and stop drilling and drilling and drilling for oil. We need a different world, a humane world. And first and foremost, we need to stop the genocide in Gaza. Humanity cannot allow a single day more of this genocide for the genocidal Netanyahu and his allies in Europe and the United States to continue. The United Nations must uphold the decisions of the International Court of Justice. International law is the basis of civilization and of its wisdom as distilled in history, and it must make sure that the decisions of international justice are implemented, are applied. Diplomacy has been tried in Gaza. It could not resolve the situation. I'm sorry, President Macron. We can keep insisting and insisting when every single day, every single minute, a missile is fired and destroys the bodies of babies and children in the Arab state of Palestine. Every day there are decisions, resolutions that are vetoed in the Security Council. Every day more and more children die, more and more bombs, more and more dead. Perhaps those who do this, who shoot this are robots. Maybe they don't have their own children. They're not human. Can we stop the genocide with a vote of the General Assembly? Yes, that's what we should do rather than a vote in the Security Council because that is vetoed. United for peace for Palestine. We should establish a peacekeeping force to protect what's necessary today, where it's not blue helmets that often lack training and they're not ready to do this. No, what we need is a powerful army of countries that do not accept genocide. That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples most importantly as an integral part of humanity to bring together weapons and armies to defend Palestine. I invite the armies of Asia and the brave Slavic people who defeated Hitler and the Latin American people of Bolivar, of Garibaldi and others. I think we've had enough words. Today the time has come to use the slogan of Bolivar, freedom or death, because Washington and NATO are killing democracy and they're spreading totalitarianism at the global level. We need to raise the red and black banner flag without forgetting the white color which was the color of peace and the color of hope in the heart of humanity. The United States no longer teach democracy but rather kill democracy, especially among its immigrants, filled with greed. The UN should begin its change by stopping the genocide in Gaza with an army of liberation and salvation, and there should be a decision here taken in the General Assembly without any veto. After Gaza we can start working on decarbonization so that we can found a truly global democracy and a new Security Council can be established without any vetoes and where its decisions would be binding. The global and national financial system should be based on decentralized capital. That is the way that humankind can regulate capital, to subordinate capital to life, to regulate it, to regulate it to people. That is the path by which the United Nations will move from an alliance of states to an alliance of cultures and peoples. If we overcome the climate crisis and if we unite as humanity, we will manage to make the United Nations an assembly of peoples which seeks to make sure that every individual is free, seeking making sure that every human being achieves their potential because the intelligence of human beings illuminated by science will make it possible to not only save life but to fulfill the mission of humanity by expanding life into the stars. A humanity that is united and free can look at the stars and reach the stars as the Romans, the legionnaires, thought of Judea when they used the word astra or star. It's the time of freedom or death, real death from missiles, but freedom is also real in the heart of human beings and its capacity to rebel and to resist. Thank you very much. On behalf of the Assembly, I thank the President of the Republic of Colombia.