Costa Rica, 2008

I

received the news of your election to the General

Assembly presidency, Sir, with a brother’s pride.

Twenty-one years ago, it was through war in Central

America that we became acquainted. Today it is peace

that allows us to meet once more. In the name of the

people of Costa Rica, and in my own name as well, I

am honoured to extend to you a brotherly Central

American greeting.

I have come here to speak words of the urgency

that any leader feels at decisive moments in history.

This is not just any year. While we hold this General

Assembly, millions of people who used to be able to

meet their most basic needs have seen the face of

poverty once again. Hunger, that abominable monster

that we had escaped for so many years, has returned to

chase away the dreams of humanity. Pessimism and

hopelessness have taken control of our economies, and,

as always, the poorest among us will pay the

consequences. World military spending has reached

$3.3 billion per day, but international aid continues to

reach the poorest countries at a snail’s pace and fails to

reach middle-income countries altogether. Brutal

hurricanes and intense droughts remind us that this

planet reacts to our irrationality, and the time that

remains for us may be a countdown to disaster if we do

not make a change.

It may be that in no other General Assembly have

issues more global than now been discussed. Our

interdependence has made us all vulnerable, but in that

interdependence also lies our strength. In the past, a

nation could avert its gaze from distant suffering and

scorn the pain of others. Today, that option does not

exist. Every victory and every failure is shared.

The man who, motivated by hunger, cuts down a

tree in the virgin Amazon rainforest unwittingly

deprives us of a fraction of the air we breathe in this

room. The European mother who is forced to buy less

food because she cannot afford the costs unwittingly

affects the economy of all nations in the world. The

African child who drops out of school because of a

lack of resources unwittingly determines the future

performance of our species. We are all united in that,

and perhaps for the first time in history, no one can

look in another direction. We are seated simultaneously

at the prosecutor’s bench and at the defence table, in

the public gallery and in the judge’s chair.

We must take advantage of this moment when

equality among nations is seen in the equality of our

challenges. We will not be able to face our realities

unless we understand them completely. We will not be

able to shine the light of reason upon our Earth if we

intentionally leave some regions in the dark. If we are

seriously to take up the challenges of our time it is

right that like that old protagonist of the Charles

Dickens tale, we open our eyes to our past, our present

and our future; we must guarantee peace and justice for

the past, peace and development for the present, peace

and nature for the future.

In the Preamble to the United Nations Charter,

the States that make up this Organization undertook to

establish conditions under which justice can be

41 08-51839

maintained. Of those conditions, perhaps the most

important is will: the will to demand that our

obligations are fulfilled; the will to speak out when

international law is violated; and, above all, the will to

ensure that acts that are an affront to all humankind do

not go unnoticed.

Evil springs not only from action but also and,

above all, from omission. To keep silent when crimes

are grave and responsibilities are clear is not to remain

neutral but is to side with the aggressors. Our recent

past is marked by horrendous, unpunished crimes that

call out, not for vengeance, but for justice. We cannot

accept that evil is banal. If we do not want to repeat the

painful history of Kosovo and Bosnia, of Rwanda and

Kampuchea, then it is time for the international

community to demand that those responsible for the

crimes committed in Darfur be judged before the

international criminal court. Costa Rica will oppose

any attempt to avoid such a path, which is the path of

peace. Forgiveness is based on memory, not on

dissimulation; and peace will be possible only through

memory. We must understand, in the words of Elie

Wiesel, “that the memory of evil will serve as a shield

against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a

shield against death”.

If the spirit of the past calls on us to hold people

responsible for the violation of human rights, the spirit

of the present calls on us to ensure that those rights are

fulfilled today. Governments can indirectly hurt their

peoples in many ways, one of which is excessive

military spending. In developing nations, in particular,

every long-range missile, every helicopter gunship and

every tank is a symbol of the deferred needs of our

people. On a planet where one sixth of the population

lives on less than a dollar a day, spending $1.2 trillion

on arms and soldiers is an offence and a symbol of

irrationality because the security of a satisfied world is

more certain than the security of an armed world. Latin

America is not immune to this phenomenon. Last year

Latin American military spending reached $39 billion,

in a region that has never been more peaceful or more

democratic.

I know of no greater perversion of values and no

greater misplacement of priorities. With a small

percentage of world military spending we could give

drinking water to all of humanity, equip all homes with

electricity, achieve universal literacy, and eradicate all

preventable diseases. I am not talking about the utopia

of a world without armies. Unfortunately, that is an

idea whose time has not yet come. I am talking about

tiny percentages of an expenditure that could be

reduced without harming the ability of countries to

defend themselves — particularly developing

countries. That is why my Government has presented

the Costa Rica consensus, an initiative that would

establish mechanisms to forgive debts and use

international financial resources to support developing

nations that spend more and more on environmental

protection, education, health care and housing for their

people and less and less on arms and soldiers. I am

convinced that that will bring us greater development,

greater security and greater peace than all the money

that we have now set aside for our armies. I humbly

ask members today to support this initiative.

I also ask for members’ support for the arms trade

treaty that Costa Rica is advocating within this

Organization, to prohibit the transfer of arms to States,

groups or individuals if there is sufficient reason to

believe that those arms will be used to violate human

rights or international law, or to interfere with

sustainable development. The destructive power of the

world’s existing 640 million small arms and light

weapons, most in the hands of civilians, deserves the

same attention or even more attention than military

spending.

However, no matter how urgent it may be to

ensure the present development of our peoples, it is

equally important to ensure their future development.

The spirit of the future, as we look ahead to it, offers

us a desolate image. Imagine an unending desert, a

cracked ground too hot to stand on. Imagine a planet

where life has been displaced and only cockroaches, if

anything, can survive. Imagine a world whose range of

colours, which until now has been endless, is reduced

to grays and dark browns. Imagine polluted air,

impossible to breathe. “This is not a poor copy of

John’s delirium during his exile on Patmos” as Gabriel

Garcia Márquez once said. I am not describing the

Apocalypse but simply the world that awaits us if we

do not take action right away to declare “peace with

nature”.

Sixty years ago an illustrious Costa Rican, a

visionary and brave man, José Figueres Ferrer,

abolished my country’s army. What had been the

general headquarters of the Costa Rican armed forces

is today our main national museum. Our children have

never seen a column of soldiers on the march; they

know only the march of columns of ants. No Costa

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Rican children know the difference between this or that

missile, or this or that combat plane, but they can

distinguish among the trees of the forest and the

animals of the sea; they know the importance of the

water cycle, of wind energy, of rivers and of sun. Ours

is a nation of peace among humans, but we also aspire

to be a nation of peace with all forms of life.

We have set a goal of becoming carbon-neutral

by 2021. Last year we became the world leader for the

number of trees per capita and square kilometre,

planting 5 million trees. In 2008 we will plant

7 million more. We are leading an international crusade

against global warming and environmental destruction,

with a special focus on the planet’s primary forests.

Today, Assembly members, I ask you to join us.

The march of humanity through history is neither

linear nor continuous. It is marked by detours and

pitfalls, and even by painful setbacks. As in Pedro

Calderón de la Barcá’s play La Vida es Sueña, one

morning we awake as princes and the next we are no

more than beggars. But not everything in life is a

dream. There are concrete realities that we have been

able to build. There are indisputable achievements in

the history of humankind. This Organization is one of

them. Members may tell me that the United Nations is

founded on the search for peace, understanding among

peoples and respect for international law. That is all

true. But I dare to say that more than anything else this

Organization is founded on hope, the hope that our

march is upward, that our future will be better, and that

a promised land lies behind the deserts of violence and

injustice that, with courage, we have been able to

cross.

I assure this Assembly that if we confront the

spirit of our past, of our present and of our future, if we

build peace on a base of justice, development and

nature, and if we turn away from forgetfulness, arms

and environmental destruction we will reach that

promised land some day and our children and our

children’s children will never again be beggars in the

kingdom of their dreams.