Colombia

Vengo de uno de los tres países más bellos de la Tierra.

I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth. There is an explosion of life. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and of magic. There, in the mountains and valleys of every shade of green, not only do abundant waters flow down, but torrents of blood flow down as well. I come from a country of bloodstained beauty.

My country is not only beautiful, it is also violent.

How can beauty be conjugated with death? How can the biodiversity of life erupt alongside the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror?

Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and self-interest? Who leads us to destruction as a nation and as a people?

My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon Rainforest, that of the Chocó, the waters, the Andean mountain ranges, and the oceans.

There in those jungles, planetary oxygen is emitted and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of those plants that absorbs CO2, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on Earth. By whatever means necessary, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, it is the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas.

As at a paradoxical crossroads. The jungle that they seek to save is, at the same time, destroyed.

To destroy the coca plant they spray poisons, mass glyphosate that runs through the waters, they detain its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, a million Latin Americans are killed, and two million Blacks are imprisoned in North America. "Destroy the plant that kills," they shout from the north, but the plant is just one more among the millions that perish when fire is unleashed upon the jungle.

Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, became the watchword followed by states and business interests. It does not matter that scientists cry out, naming the jungle as one of the great climate pillars. For the power relations of the world, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that scourges them. Power relations are scourged by addiction to money, to perpetuating themselves, to oil, to cocaine, and to harder drugs still, in order to anesthetize themselves further.

Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the jungle.

The jungle burns, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The jungle, the climate pillar of the world, disappears along with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The saving jungle is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be exterminated. The space of coca and of the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, is demonized. To you, my country matters only so you can spray poisons on its jungles, take its men off to prison, and cast its women into exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing his jungle and extracting the coal and oil from its depths. The sponge that absorbs poisons is not useful to you; you prefer to spray more poisons into the atmosphere.

We serve you as an excuse for the emptiness and loneliness of your own society, which lives amid the bubbles of drugs. We conceal your problems, which you refuse to reform. Better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people.

While you let the jungles burn, while hypocritically you pursue the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of your own society, you demand more and more coal, more and more oil from us, to satisfy the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.

What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal, or oil? The ruling of power has decreed that cocaine is the poison and must be persecuted, even though it causes only minimal deaths from overdose, and more from the mixtures caused by its decreed clandestinity — while, on the other hand, coal and oil must be protected, even though their use may extinguish all of humanity. These are the ways of world power, the ways of injustice, the ways of irrationality, because world power has become irrational.

They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, something lustful, something sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, steeped in the boundless compulsion to have and to consume. How else can they hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness amid societies without affection, so competitive that they imprison the soul in solitude, except by blaming the plant, the man who grows it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle. According to the irrational power of the world, the fault does not lie with the market that curtails existence; the fault lies with the jungle and those who inhabit it.

Bank accounts have become limitless; the money hoarded by the most powerful on Earth could not even be spent over centuries. The sadness of existence produced by that artificial summons to compete, they fill with noise and with drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs among those who lose the competition, among the losers of the artificial race into which they have transformed humanity. The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate sprayed over the jungles. The jungle is not to blame. The one to blame is your society, educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness — a confusion that does, indeed, allow the pockets of power to fill with money.

The one to blame for drug addiction is not the jungle; it is the irrationality of your world power.

Deal a blow of reason to your power. Turn on again the lights of the century.

The war on drugs has lasted 40 years. If we do not correct course and it goes on for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of fentanyl overdoses — a drug not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of African Americans imprisoned in its private jails. The imprisoned Black man will become a business for prison corporations; a million more Latin Americans will be murdered; our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood; they will see the dream of democracy die, both in my America and in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die there where it was born, in great Western European Athens.

For hiding the truth, they will see the jungle die, and democracies die.

The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed.

Deadly consumption has increased; from soft drugs they have moved to the hardest ones; a genocide has been produced on my continent and in my country; they have condemned millions of people to prison; to hide their own social failings they have blamed the jungle and its plants. They have filled their speeches and their policies with senselessness.

I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, an end to the irrational war on drugs. Reducing drug consumption does not require wars; it requires that we all build a better society: a society more united, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and from new forms of slavery. Do you want fewer drugs? Think about less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.

Do not touch the beauty of my homeland with your poisons. Help us, without hypocrisy, to save the Amazon Rainforest in order to save the life of humanity on this planet.

You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climate models they said that the end of the human species was approaching, that our time is no longer measured in millennia, nor even in centuries. Science sounded the alarm and we stopped listening to it. War served us as an excuse not to take the necessary measures.

When actions were most needed, when speeches no longer sufficed, when it was essential to deposit money into funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away as quickly as possible from coal and oil, you invented one war after another. You invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, and Libya, and Syria. You invaded in the name of oil and gas.

In the 21st century you discovered the worst of your addictions: the addiction to money and to oil.

Wars have served you as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown you how dependent you are on what will bring an end to the human species.

If you see that peoples are filled with hunger and thirst and are emigrating by the millions toward the north, toward where the water is, then you shut them in, you build walls, you deploy machine guns, you shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings; you multiply fivefold the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps; you reproduce 1933 on a planetary scale. The great triumph of the assault on reason.

Can you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed upon your countries is to let the water fill the rivers again and the fields fill with nutrients once more?

The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm and devastate us, yet you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what that same market has created. Humanity's Frankenstein lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Bringing human rationality to its knees before greed.

What is the point of war if what we need is to save the human species? What use are NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence?

The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people, and hear this well: it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital. The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of relating to one another in order to consume more and more, to produce more and more, and so that some may earn more and more, produces the climate disaster. They linked to the logic of expanded accumulation the energy engines of coal and oil, and unleashed the hurricane: the chemical change of the atmosphere, ever deeper and more deadly. Now, in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.

From the lands of the jungle and of beauty. There, where they decided to turn an Amazonian jungle plant into an enemy, to extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war, and to stop the climate disaster.

Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity. Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity.

Behind the addiction to cocaine and to drugs, behind the addiction to oil and to coal, lies the true addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit, and to money. Here is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.

I propose, as president of one of the most beautiful countries on Earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, that we end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace.

I call upon all of Latin America toward this purpose. I call upon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrationality that martyrs our body.

I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest in its entirety, with the resources that can be allocated worldwide for life. If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the jungles, if allocating money to weapons weighs more heavily than allocating it to life, then reduce the external debt so as to free up our own budgetary space, and with it carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it ourselves if you do not wish to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature.

I propose, and I call upon Latin America to join me in this, dialogue to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves on the battlefields of war. It is the hour of PEACE. Let the Slavic peoples speak to one another, let the peoples of the world do so. War is only a trap that hastens the end of times in the great orgy of irrationality.

From Latin America, we call upon Ukraine and Russia to make peace.

Only in peace will we be able to save life on this, our earth. There is no total peace without social, economic, and environmental justice.

We are at war, also, with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations.

Without social justice, there is no social peace.