Venezuela, 2003

I begin this speech with mixed emotions —

happiness over the election of our friend Julian Hunte

— Minister of our sister country in the Caribbean,

Saint Lucia — as President of this body; and pain,

because our United Nations lost one of its best people,

as did Brazil, an exemplary member of one of the

world’s soundest diplomatic systems. Sergio Vieira de

Mello died for peace and human rights, causes that

illuminated his life as a diplomat and a Brazilian.

There are other unfortunate examples from other

times. We lost Anna Lindh, Swedish Minister for Foreign

Affairs, and daughter of the one of the countries most

closely linked to social justice, who was educated in

the Nordic tradition of social advancement and

commitment to peace and democracy. Years earlier,

another Swede — Olaf Palme — died, a man of peace and

good will, to whom the international community bade

farewell with the song of Chilean Violeta Parra, Gracias a

la vida, as a tribute to his struggles on behalf of the

persecuted, the disenfranchised and the impoverished.

At the beginning of the 1960s, while on a peace

mission, United Nations Secretary-General Dag

Hammarskjöld, also from Sweden, died in what was

apparently an accident, amid the tangled, political

turbulence in a Congo assailed by its enemies at home,

as well as international factors that were depriving its

sovereign leadership of vital oxygen. Still earlier,

Count Folke Bernadotte — also Swedish — was a

victim of terrorism while on a peace mission for the

United Nations in Jerusalem. Even before that, at the

end of the Second World War, Swedish diplomat Raoul

Wallenberg, who, from Budapest, opened the way to

freedom for Jews who were being persecuted by Nazi

barbarity, disappeared without a trace.

It seems that nothing has changed. Social

injustice goes on forever. Conflicts repeat themselves.

The protagonists of historic change are physically

eliminated or morally destroyed. The advocacy of

violence is dragging us towards terrorism and war.

Inspired by the values of social justice,

democracy and peace, on behalf of the President of the

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Fr'as,

I wish to reaffirm our support for the United Nations

from a position that is critical yet unambiguous and

totally consistent with its loftiest goals. These same

values inspire us in Venezuela, a country that prided

itself on being the richest and most democratic nation in

Latin America, but that squandered its privileged

historical opportunities and fell into a process of ethnical

and social decay that has brought us close to the abyss.

As a result, we had to assume a profound process of

transformation towards peace and democracy.

The sectors affected by the democratic

transformation have resorted to force to frustrate this

commitment of the majority. They have resorted to

military coup, oil sabotage, financial panic and media

terrorism. Thank God that they failed, but they still

caused much damage.

The provisions of a Constitution approved by the

people in a referendum that expands the basis of

democracy in a social State founded on law, and which

is truly our country plan for all, have generated violent

and anti-democratic opposition. Opening the way to

participatory democracy and to an economy that is free,

yet not anarchic, and that protects private freedoms

without bowing to the almighty market, has stirred up

the most egoistic and insensitive sector of our country

and of the international community — the neoliberals.

On this subject, His Holiness Pope Paul VI, in his

encyclical Populorum Progressio, of March 1967, said

“This unchecked liberalism leads to dictatorship

rightly denounced by Pius XI as producing ‘the

international imperialism of money’. One cannot

condemn such abuses too strongly by solemnly

recalling once again that the economy is at the

service of man.”

Entrepreneurs who took no risks, protected by a

colluding Government under a captive market, who did

not compete and who evaded taxation promoted a

conspiracy against the legitimate Government of

Venezuela, allied with international sectors that had

been past beneficiaries.

Now, therefore, our democracy, threatened

unsuccessfully by certain Venezuelan media magnates,

invites members of the international community to see

for themselves in Venezuela the strength of our society

and the immense civil liberties available in our country,

including the broadest freedom of expression in our

entire hemisphere. We will welcome witnesses to come

to Venezuela and watch our television, read our

newspapers, interview the owners of the private media,

listen to commentators and news anchors, and draw

their own conclusions. We need them to familiarize

themselves with the most hidden threat against

democracy: the media dictatorship, a mirror of the

culture of violence and mediocrity.

Our process of social change in peace and

democracy was interrupted by an assault against

legality by the media and their hypnotized followers. In

scarcely three days, during their ephemeral de facto

Government, all democratic institutions were

abolished, before people and soldiers in the streets

restored normalcy. Today, we aspire to peace and

reconciliation among Venezuelans. In our democracy,

there is room and hope for everyone.

We want also peace for our sister Colombia and

in Northern Ireland, in the Balkans, between Jews and

Palestinians and throughout the world. Peace is also the

aspiration of the Members of the United Nations, but

there will not be lasting peace without social justice; there

will not be stable democracies without social justice; and

freedom will be a fraud without social justice.

We congratulate the Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi

Annan, on his balanced and firm guidance of the

Organization at the very difficult time that the world is

passing through and on his wise and heartfelt message

to this democratic Assembly.

This year, our activities in the General Assembly are

overclouded by the attack on the United Nations

headquarters in Baghdad, where so many faithful servants

of the Organization lost their lives, by the aftermath of

the war and the tense situation existing in the Middle East

and by the alarming world poverty indices, a scenario that

leads us to profound reflection and demands that we

strengthen the Organization’s capacity to respond.

Venezuela’s action has been aimed at restoring

and promoting multilateralism as a means and a

blueprint for the shaping of a more democratic world.

Unilateralism is monochromatic, worn out, oppressive

and authoritarian; multilateralism is polychromatic,

animated, tolerant and democratic. In that conviction, we

assumed the responsibility of chairing the Group of 77

last year and the Group of 15, whose summit meeting we

will hold next year in my country. There are mechanisms

through which the developing world is expressing its

multilateral voice and its aspirations to the universal

common good and to international social justice.

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Historical developments since 1945 require that

we have a more democratic and more representative

Security Council. We must strengthen the General

Assembly given its democratic and participatory nature.

We want the Economic and Social Council to be the

powerful organ that it has not been allowed to be.

The Charter of the United Nations cannot be

tailored to suit unilateral conveniences. War is not a

romantic adventure that brings us to a happy ending in

which the superheroes defeat the villains. Sometimes,

war turns into a death trap that causes harsher suffering

than the suffering that, in theory, it intends to alleviate.

Sometimes, it brings other wars, more violence and

more terrorism.

Use of force by the State should not be

undertaken at the discretion of those who happen to be

interested at the time. The responsibility of the

Organization’s Members is collective, as the

international security that we want to protect and

guarantee must be. We all desire a better world for

future generations, and why not for ourselves? We are

all protagonists in this world drama; hegemonies

appear archaic and authoritarian. Our objective is a

strengthened, universal and democratic Organization.

A year ago in this Hall, we condemned the

abominable terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, in

which we lost thousands of citizens of the United

States and of other countries. That sudden holocaust

was perhaps the product of religious fundamentalism,

but it is unjust to single out the believers of one faith

for acts of extremist minorities when other minorities

of believers have also committed crimes against

humanity in the name of the Lord. Terrorism destroys

human lives, both of innocents and of combatants; it

torments family members, friends and peoples. There is

no good terrorism, not in the name of an ethnicity or of

a nationality; not in the name of justice or of freedom;

not in the name of God.

Four days ago, on behalf of the Bolivarian

Republic of Venezuela, I deposited the ratification

instruments of the International Convention for the

Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, the International

Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of

Terrorism and the Optional Protocol to the Convention

on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of

children in armed conflicts. Yesterday, the Venezuelan

Parliament made the Inter-American Convention

against Terrorism a law of the Republic. We hope that

the ratification procedure will be completed within the

Organization of American States as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, we must continue the frontal assault

on the most widespread and destructive forms of

terrorism: poverty and social exclusion. The developing

world is suffering from hunger, poverty and exclusion

caused by an unjust economic system enveloped in the

practices of savage neo-liberalism and in the globalized

economy with an unfair scheme of commercial trade

that generates unemployment, exploitation, inequality

and resentment. It is a system that attacks the dignity of

the human person. Its leaders are not accustomed to

speaking of social justice in their statements.

One initiative that the President of Venezuela has

undertaken to fight poverty is the creation of an

international humanitarian fund that we proposed at the

International Conference on Financing for Development,

held at Monterrey; at the World Summit on Sustainable

Development, held at Johannesburg; and once again in

the General Assembly. The fund is designed to be a

consistent and innovative source for financing non-

refundable resources coming from the reduction of

military expenditures and money confiscated as a result

of narco-trafficking and corruption. It will be an

effective formula of international assistance to generate

opportunities for economic and social progress in

countries excluded from traditional financing schemes.

Converging proposals make us optimistic in the light of

this type of initiative.

I conclude with a quotation from His Holiness

John Paul II in 1994:

“The world longs for peace and has a

desperate need of peace. Yet wars, conflicts,

increasing violence and situations of social unrest

and endemic poverty continue to reap innocent

victims and to cause divisions between

individuals and peoples. At times peace appears a

truly unattainable goal! In a climate made cold by

indifference and occasionally poisoned by hatred,

how can one hope for the dawn of an era of

peace, which only feelings of solidarity and of

love can usher in?”

That is how all Members of the Organization should

concentrate our efforts to find the necessary means that

will enable us to ensure peace and democracy at home

and in the international community, availing ourselves

of the best antidote to violence: social justice.