Chile

Mr. President, dear representatives of the member states of the United Nations,

Because we hold the firm conviction that democracy is memory and future, nine days ago in our country we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état that on September 11, 1973 brutally fractured our coexistence, bringing death, pain, persecution and misery to my homeland.

The images of La Moneda, the Government Palace, being bombed, the self-immolation of the constitutional President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and also the evidence that the United States government of that time, under President Nixon, had conspired from the outset to promote the failure of the Chilean government, moved the democratic conscience of the world. While there were some countries that at that time were betting on the destabilization of fragile democracies and others more robust, there were also multilateral bodies such as the United Nations system that played a fundamental role in the defense of human rights and democracy, because, from the very first moment, they took a stand to defend those who suffered the most, the most defenseless, in Latin America, in Chile and in much of the world.

For this reason, we owe the United Nations, as well as several of the countries present here, an enormous debt of infinite gratitude. There were thousands who anonymously gave aid to the persecuted, saved lives and exercised a solidarity that to this day moves us, with the victims of the dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet.

Since then, our country has traveled a long road. As Chilean men and women, we feel proud to have united in order to recover democracy, restore the Republic and rebuild the path of expansion of rights and fundamental freedoms that the founders of our homeland had won. Chile is a country that loves and promotes peace, and it is from that identity that characterizes us that I come to speak to you.

Fifty years after this tragedy that I describe to you, we have taken on our pain and have been confronting it with initiatives such as the Rettig Commission, the Valech Commission, or today the National Search Plan. But consequently, Chile is a country that progresses because we have drawn lessons from our past; we are revisiting our past in order to build a better future, and from that learning we project ourselves toward the challenges that the present poses to us.

I would say that the main one, and one on which we are largely in agreement and which I have heard in the speeches that preceded us, is that the problems of democracy must always be resolved with more democracy and never with less, and that a coup d'état is never inevitable; democracy always offers alternatives.

We also learned that human rights are an ethical foundation and an inalienable political choice, and that human rights have no political color and must be promoted and defended at all times and in all places, and their violation must be condemned clearly regardless of the political color of the government that violates them. This is a principle that we have upheld and will continue to uphold, especially as members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

We also learned, through our history, that democracy is fragile, that it is not guaranteed forever and that, therefore, we must safeguard it; that violence is not acceptable as a form of political choice in a democracy and that dialogue between those who think differently must always prevail, which also applies to relations between countries. For this reason, I want to reaffirm Chile's deep commitment to multilateralism and to peaceful mechanisms for the settlement of disputes.

We also learned—and I think this is important to highlight in times of polarization—that when we manage to unite around common objectives, we can move forward in a plural manner for the benefit of our peoples. Because it is true, and anyone who follows the debate in our country will be able to see, that in Chile great differences persist, but there are also great consensuses. And thus, together with the four living former presidents and myself, we signed a commitment looking to the future for democracy and human rights, and we invited other state leaders to join it as well.

And even in the most heated political moments, we—government and opposition—are capable of coming together to seek paths that allow us to overcome deadlocks and put our people ahead of our legitimate differences. And thus, together—I insist, together—government and opposition are building paths to address the demands of our people.

The generations that preceded us, dear colleagues, took on the responsibility of gaining independence for our nations, of establishing democracies and fundamental freedoms, universal human rights, and progressively advancing the achievement of social rights. My generation, which had not yet been born at the time of the 1973 coup d'état, has the no less difficult task of consolidating and defending many of these legacies, while at the same time facing new threats and challenges with optimism.

Mr. President, distinguished members of the Assembly,

Today I want to put forward three urgent tasks to which, humbly, we believe in my homeland we must devote ourselves, and which coincide with much of what has been raised in this Assembly today.

The first urgent task is to safeguard democracy. We must halt the advance of intolerance and authoritarianism, decisively confront the disinformation that corrodes our democracies institutionally and without inhibition, while at the same time defending the progress and rights of minorities, and also of those who are not a minority but a majority, such as women, whose progress and rights are threatened by sectarianism and fanaticism of various kinds.

We must, dear colleagues, address the deep causes of the disaffection that democracy generates, because we see with concern that its loss or fragility today may not be expressed through the coups d'état of the 20th century, but may take new forms, some even with the appearance of a majority.

Why is democracy today not satisfying the aspirations of peoples who urgently want, who need, security, greater equality, to escape poverty? Democracy must be capable of delivering results, and we must devote ourselves to this with great determination.

When institutions are slow to respond, or fail to do so clearly in time, corruption, organized crime, multiple inequalities—all these challenges that erode our institutions—cause the population to lose trust. That is why safeguarding democracy, dear colleagues, means taking responsibility for the frustrations, aspirations and needs of citizens, channeling the challenges that our times impose and moving forward with concrete actions, with greater freedom, prosperity, social justice, sustainability, and always placing the collective interest ahead of individual interests, in particular the individual interests of those who hold the most power, including ourselves as governments.

In this regard, we also defend strict respect for human rights as a civilizational advance, independent of which government is in power. That is why I feel it is my duty, as we have stated in other international forums, to denounce before this Assembly and the world the persecution suffered today by anyone who thinks differently from the dictatorial regime of Mr. Ortega and Murillo in Nicaragua, where not only is participation in elections prohibited, but people are persecuted, stripped of their nationality, have their homes raided, and are deprived of political rights.

At the same time, dear colleagues, we must think together that any solution to these problems necessarily involves multilateral dialogue. And so we must say clearly that when sanctions are imposed unilaterally, this does not contribute to a solution. The case of the sanctions on Venezuela today, from our perspective, does not contribute to improving the living conditions of the Venezuelan people, and we are convinced that in order to guarantee free elections, with guarantees for all sectors, it is also imperative that the United States lift the sanctions it currently maintains against Venezuela.

We cannot but say that we feel the same violation with respect to the sanctions imposed on Cuba for so long. And on this I want to be very clear: declaring that Cuba is a country that promotes terrorism is not only false, it is an affront to us. Therefore, we urge the United States to follow the path that the government of Barack Obama took at the time when it removed Cuba from that infamous list—a designation that has now been repeated for three years and that does so much harm, not to the government, but to the Cuban people, who do not deserve it.

We also feel it is our duty to raise our voice regarding two conflicts that have torn at our humanity across different eras. Some will legitimately ask: why does Chile speak about conflicts in such distant countries? Because all of humanity's pain hurts us, and because we cannot remain silent when we see, for example, the illegal occupation and the denial of the possibility of a Palestinian government, the wall that has been installed and that divides its own citizens; and while recognizing the right to exist of both states, Israel and Palestine, we also demand from this podium respect for international law.

And in a more recent conflict, but one in which we also see the ambiguities that arise when this happens geopolitically, we cannot but clearly and explicitly condemn Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. On this point, we hold the conviction that one cannot blame or hold equally responsible the invading government and the invaded people for a conflict of this nature, and that, therefore, peace requires guaranteeing respect for the territorial integrity of nations.

And we say this as a small or medium-sized country, as ours is, in the south of the world, in Chile, because we know that countries like ours have only international law to defend themselves against possible future aggression. Today it is Ukraine, tomorrow it could be any one of us, and in the face of that we cannot close our eyes, nor can we allow ourselves to be ambiguous in condemning what, from our perspective, is an illegal war of aggression.

A second issue that requires urgent action, and where responsibilities likewise do not fall equally on everyone, is the crisis of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. On this, the diagnoses are widely known; practically every head of state has spoken about it. These are problems of today, not of tomorrow. In my homeland we have experienced it through fires and floods, and we know that most of you, particularly the most vulnerable, those who have contributed the least to global warming, those who have burned the fewest fossil fuels, are the ones who suffer most from this climate crisis.

That is why we call, just as we did this morning at the high-level panel discussing this topic, for rapid action, for accelerating the energy transition, for changing our consumption patterns and establishing new rules and institutions that allow us to meet these demands.

In our country, we have made progress in this direction under different leaderships and different governments. We have 43% of protected marine areas and 22% of protected land areas. We have passed a law to create the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service, in addition to committing to being carbon-neutral by 2050 at the latest, and we hope to get there sooner.

However, climate change has confronted us with threats that are increasingly frequent and complex. Today we suffer a severe drought that, despite this year's rains—which in turn brought floods to a land that had lost the habit of receiving the water that gives it life—and forest fires, we are experiencing, as you can see, various phenomena that directly strike the most vulnerable.

We know this is repeated in other latitudes: the devastating events that occurred in Libya, which the Secretary-General referred to in his address yesterday; in Pakistan last year; the drought in Argentina, in Central America, in the Horn of Africa—these are just some examples that should compel us to act now.

That is why more is needed, and I want to responsibly call on the countries with the greatest industrial activity to adopt an ethic of responsibility that is not only more respectful of the environment, but also more in solidarity with those who, for example, the small islands of the Pacific or Oceania or Central America, or the Caribbean, are suffering the most devastating effects of the climate crisis—the loss and damage from this crisis that we did not cause.

From Chile, we are strongly promoting international agreements for environmental protection, and among other efforts, last year we launched the Coalition of the Americas for the Protection of the Oceans, and this year we signed the Treaty on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity (BBNJ). And today I reiterate before this Assembly our willingness and readiness for Valparaíso, historic port of the Americas, Pearl of the Pacific, to host the secretariat of this treaty. Count on us for its development and for the contribution to a fairer, more sustainable and more equitable development.

And finally, the third challenge, we believe, relates to technological change that can only be compared to the Industrial Revolution of the mid-18th century, and that is drastically changing our way of relating to one another, our way of thinking, of producing, of working. Not long ago we saw how, in a town in Spain, a mother reported that some young people had used artificial intelligence to digitally undress their female classmates, tarnishing not only their honor, but also their right to personhood, to integrity, to privacy.

Every great technological transformation has always, throughout human history, been a great opportunity to build fairer societies, but also, if we do it wrong, it can be a source of new injustices. And in this context, it is everyone's duty to establish multilateral consensus to provide an ethical framework for the development and use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. We need a framework that incorporates a human rights perspective into technological research and innovation, considering the safeguarding and promotion of the freedom and dignity of people and peoples, as well as the needs of sustainable development.

Our societies must move forward, and we have no doubt about that, but we must do so responsibly. That is why understanding and better managing the opportunities that the future offers us, in order to use them for our benefit before they become threats and end up deepening existing inequalities, is a duty—this is, for example, what we do in Chile through the Future Congress, and I have no doubt that you also have similar initiatives in your countries.

With humility, but also with pride, I can affirm that our country today has the conditions to become a Latin American reference point looking toward the future of artificial intelligence, and we will work firmly in that direction.

Democracy is memory and future, and that is why we want technological development to be a tool for unity and not for division, one that promotes the collective empowerment of society, that confronts the phenomenon of disinformation, that above all supports the most vulnerable sectors, and that does not result in a deepening of existing inequities, both globally and within our own countries.

I will close by saying that the challenges we face require bold and collective solutions, because none of us, not even the most powerful country, can face these challenges alone. Migration phenomena, the climate crisis, pandemics have no borders or flags; they affect all the countries of the world.

That is why this Assembly must rise to the occasion, and let us—if we are indeed the majority—act on the words and the request that Secretary-General António Guterres made to us yesterday regarding the need to reform global governance, both in its political and financial aspects. It is reform or barbarism. We stand for reform, and we tell the Secretary-General that he has our support to reform not only the Security Council, but also the financial organizations born after the Bretton Woods Consensus.

I insist, democracy is memory and future, and on this path toward a better world, the role of this General Assembly is decisive. That is why, and because we have learned from our past, and as a representative of new generations, I am optimistic about what is to come. Because this very Assembly, over more than 70 years of history, has shown that even in the most difficult moments it is possible for humanity to reach agreements and paths toward cooperation and civilized coexistence.

You can always count on Chile, dear colleagues, to promote and defend human rights, multilateralism, democracy, and to build together sustainable development and a world without poverty and with greater social equality.

Thank you very much.