Venezuela, 1996

I would like first of all to congratulate

Ambassador Razali on his election to the presidency of

the Assembly and to wish him every success in his work.

It would seem that after half a century, the debate on

the meaning, importance, role and timeliness of this

Organization has become increasingly impassioned. It

could be said that the United Nations is on trial.

It may be that some of the criticism is justified. It is

accused, for instance, of having a large bureaucracy, and

it is said that there is a proliferation of situations

requiring the deployment of military forces to pave the

path for peace, which is also a path riddled with war.

These situations came about without the consent of the

Member States, who must all bear their share of the costs.

This enlarged bureaucracy, added to the expenses of

military peacekeeping, increases the financial burden of

the weaker countries. Yet, it seems to be the strong

countries that most resent and denounce this burden.

Nevertheless, to thoroughly assess and evaluate what

the United Nations is and what it represents, we would

have to compare it to another such organization of its

kind, one that had brought together nearly 200 sovereign

States, led them by the hand through 50 of the most

enigmatic and dangerous years of history and remained a

point of reference when all the ideological references had

collapsed. And that other organization has never existed.

As far as we know, humanity has never lived

through 50 continuous years of peace, yet 51 years have

passed without a tremor of generalized conflict like the

ones that once seemed to be cyclical. Even though

misunderstandings and aggressions appear on one

continent or another, based on deep-seated racial,

religious or political hatred, and leading to genocide or

local wars, we cannot speak of a conflagration, especially

when the will of the people of all regions rises above

these wars, committed to the restoration of peace.

The international community, in varying degrees, has

started to review its greatest Organization, and it has

focused its attention first on the Security Council.

Fortunately, the creative imagination of States has

suggested various ways to change it in order to make it

more representative of the new world realities and, of

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course, to make it more efficient. My country follows this

process with enormous interest, aware that the Security

Council will be the centre of balance of the world system.

In the meantime, this long period of relative peace has

allowed for the rise of European integration, which is

perhaps the greatest political achievement of our century. It

has made possible the growth of daring and vigorous

technological civilizations in Asian countries as well as

understanding and growth in the Latin American region,

which today has become, thanks to this understanding,

humankind’s most promising abode. In this framework,

Venezuela has broadened its ties with and deepened its

commitments to the great causes of our time, such as the

enforcement of human rights, truly representative

democracy, integration as an economic and political culture

of our modern era and disarmament as a guarantee of world

security. Tomorrow, on behalf of my country I shall

proudly sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

My country hopes that the criticism levelled at the

Organization will justify itself by leading to logical plans to

reform and revitalize it. Its success must be definitively

established in the implementation of human rights, in the

fight against terrorism and in the alliance to exterminate

drug trafficking and connected activities. A special session

of the General Assembly has been called on this latter topic

at Mexico’s urging.

In his current report on the work of the Organization,

the Secretary-General refers to the territorial controversy

between Venezuela and Guyana. I must note that this

controversy lies within the framework of the 1966 Geneva

agreement signed by both countries in order to reach a

practical and lasting solution to this dispute. In a spirit of

dialogue and cooperation between the two parties, we

appealed to the Secretary-General’s good offices and are

now applying one of the mechanisms for the peaceful

settlement of disputes provided for in the United Nations

Charter. We are therefore surprised that this case is

expressly mentioned in the chapter on conflict situations.

As a Latin American, I must recognize that, thanks to

this lasting peace, my region, a scion of Europe, and its

creature in many respects, has resumed friendly relations

with its natural metropolis after 80 years of world wars that

had separated us and created a rift in the cultural patterns

that had governed us for centuries.

Of course, numerous threats linger on. The so-called

weapon-States that have the financial resources to spark a

regional conflict that can multiply and spread are still there,

untouched by democratic norms and mostly driven by

fanaticism. In countries where no one would have

imagined it, the danger of racial discrimination returns

like a nightmare. At the very centre of the most cultured

continent, we have witnessed a war and a genocide that

we would angrily condemn in Cambodia or in Rwanda,

and among countries that have been an world example of

tolerance and coexistence for centuries. The followers of

two religions that are virtually the same confront and

exterminate one another almost daily.

At the same time, the conditions of exchanges, the

goals of good policies and the miracle of modern

communications lead to a free flow of trade, technology,

scientific models and human movement, both through

tourism and through commercial interests. All this is

bringing humanity together as a whole, using information

to express an impassioned interest that is beginning to be

widely known as globalization.

The Organization still has to overcome the

prophecies and schemes of pessimistic traditions,

according to which natural law dictates the existence of

wars, diseases and other disasters as a fateful necessity to

regulate population growth and as an incentive to devise

technologies and scientific developments in the escalation

that Malthusians see in their observation of nature.

Peace is the primary purpose of the United Nations;

war is the recourse most commonly used by humanity to

try to solve imbalances and resentments. And we have

peace, ceaselessly troubled but always re-established as

far as and wherever possible. But we must remember that

war is the most chronic of recidivists, since greed and

ambition feed on it.

We might say that what this Organization needs to

solve universal strife, poverty and untrammelled

population growth is a human resource development and

systematic education project to do away with the fragile

ethics of our time and to teach all nations the art of

living — and living together. Fears, suspicions and

animosities are engendered by ignorance among people

and nations.

I speak on behalf of a country whose most important

natural resource has endowed it with power and economic

euphoria on the one hand, and plunged it into acute

psychological depression on the other. That resource is

oil, of which we hold the largest and most secure reserves

in the Western world. Since oil legally belongs to the

State, as do all underground resources, the State finds it,

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processes it, sells it and distributes its revenues as services.

Little by little, the old agricultural country became used to

stretching out a hand to receive from the State gifts of

protectionism, subsidies, scholarships, credits and even

undue largesse, all of which used to come from the land as

a reward for labour.

For more than two generations Venezuelans relied

exclusively on oil, disregarding personal effort. At times,

the State demagogically encouraged this dependency and

promoted idleness, thus leading to ethical complications

born of collusion between politics and the economy. This

is the deep-seated reason for the so-called Venezuelan

crisis. It is different from others because it is not economic

but moral, and can only be solved by a return to honest

behaviour and personal endeavour, which requires a great

deal of time and effort.

This is what the Administration of President Rafael

Caldera is striving for. After trying to reverse the enormous

evils he inherited, using measures that were not too harmful

economically for the weakest sector, on 15 April, he

decided to open up the economy and incorporate prevailing

market economy values through the Venezuelan Agenda.

He was careful, however, to establish a programme to

absorb the enormous shock this opening causes

transitionally on the majorities accustomed to the old State

paternalism. After a brief period, we are emerging from this

unique crisis, which cannot be and could not have been

resolved by a simple decree, as other crises, since it

required and still requires a change in habits in order for

people to learn to be self-sufficient. The case of Venezuela

could recur in other countries characterized by State

paternalism.

If we look closely at the so-called social crisis that all

Latin American countries suffer, we can see it is due to a

lack of training. We used to say that education was the

universal solution to all problems, and it is. But at a time

when Latin American society has become unhinged because

of peasant migrations undoing the social and moral order,

with the ensuing marginalization brought about by a change

in customs leading to the degradation of the family, both

education and training are absolute necessities.

The breakdown of the traditional home deprives

people of the essential ethical values that used to be learned

from the mother. Nowadays, the State must replace the

home and the mother, in preparing the inner self of its

citizens. It is evident, therefore, that training and education

are of primary importance since the human being’s inner

self must be strengthened in order to rebuild the family

unit, which gives coherence, pride and courage to a

society. Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of America, grasped

the whole problem when he said, “Morality and

enlightenment are our first necessities”. Perhaps the whole

world today suffers the same evil and has the same needs.

The United Nations, through its specialized agencies,

is carrying out innumerable programmes, studies, trials

and experiments to solve the daily tragedy of our human

species. This is becoming more and more complex since

the efforts are aimed at an already deformed being,

incapable, therefore, of living in harmony with others.

If we were to agree that the chain connecting home,

primary school, secondary school, university, and life

broke down some time ago, and that it is missing its first

link, without which all else is pointless and without

foundation, we would invest at the very roots of human

life the economic and scientific resources needed to form

human beings from the start, enabling them to grow,

endowed with the values that would make them citizens.

Latin America, born unaware of racial hatred,

religious conflicts and territorial greed, with an indivisible

spirit made up of a combination of influences that move

in the same direction on the freest and broadest of stages,

is hurt by the fact that its real problems today are social

ones, brought on by the error of political regimes that

ignored the discipline of education or doubted its

undeniable primacy.

Democracy has taken root in Latin America as in no

other part of the universe as a consequence of political

desire. Nevertheless, we are not satisfied, because

democracy must mean the eradication of age-old ills and

constitute, more than merely a system to elect

governments, a cogent civilization.

We aspire to a democracy transparent in its conduct

and effective in its achievements to continue offering it as

an alternative to the ancient dictatorships. This explains

my country’s perseverance in attaining an honest and

clean democracy. In this regard, we have proposed a

convention against corruption, which has been approved

at the hemispheric level. Strangely enough, it would be

the first of its kind in the world, which goes to show how

strongly entrenched this vice is: it has gone unpunished

by dictatorships and democracies alike throughout time

and around the world.

The day is not distant when this instrument, limited

now to our hemisphere, will encompass our whole

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Organization, since the crime it prosecutes is not

exclusively American but takes root in many countries on

all continents. During the last substantive session of the

Economic and Social Council, Venezuela, together with

Argentina, the United States and other countries, sponsored

a United Nations declaration on corruption and bribery in

transnational commercial activities, which is clear proof that

the fight against unpunished corruption prospers in the

world.

If the United Nations, aware that the key to universal

change lies in training and education, were to inspire and

lead an in-depth study of what makes a human being, of the

way societies that break into conflict or serve as models for

others are defined by the sum of their members; if the

United Nations were to use the United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to add a

universal teaching component to all its cooperation

programmes, then the true ethical and human redemption of

society would begin.

Free of prejudice and with sufficient resources, Latin

America, a melting pot of customs and races, could serve

as a laboratory to show how the human species can

straighten its spine of ethics, which has been so twisted in

so many places. Our America as a whole is a welcoming

place for peace, since there are no elements of unease or

insecurity other than social asymmetries — not the

asymmetries of blood-lines, but those of dire poverty, born

of the incapacity to transform and distribute our plentiful

natural resources.

We are living a unique moment in history. In a short

time, without violence, we have seen great empires come to

an end, the elimination of the cruellest jails of human

thought, the liberation of all wills and the opening of the

greatest opportunity peoples have ever had to reorganize

themselves in accordance with hopes and desires that were

long repressed or thwarted by violence of all sorts.

As Marguerite Yourcenar says in her biography of

Hadrian, referring to the religious perplexity of the great

Emperor: in his lifetime the old gods no longer existed and

Christ had not yet arrived. Humanity’s present spirit seems

to be similar: free, but still dazed and hesitant to adopt a

new order from a new mould; but, above all, free, although

at this fateful moment great leaders might be lacking.

The United Nations holds and reflects this feeling —

hovering between jubilation and disbelief — like a prodigy

standing before the panorama of infinite possibilities of

what we can create with the fertile dreams of our era.