Colombia

My daughter Antonella Petro just sent me a paragraph that she wants me to begin my speech with, so with your permission I am going to read it. It is the paragraph of a 15-16 year old girl and it says the following:

"Today I am proud to present myself before you as the president of the heart of the earth. That is how our indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada named my beautiful country; geographically speaking, it makes sense that we would be the heart of the world.

However, if we are the heart, we must set the example of unity, of total peace, and of the preservation of nature. If the heart works, it is a great advance; however, all the other parts of the body are important—if one fails, the rest will too. That is why, from the heart of the earth, we invite all countries to make an act of conscience, to set aside the greed that is killing human beings and mother earth, and to take a step toward total peace."

That is as far as my daughter goes; I follow her orders and continue.

Ladies and gentlemen presidents of the world, in this chamber the capacity for communication of a president depends on the amount of dollars in his budget.

On the number of war planes he has, and at bottom, on his country's capacity for destruction of humanity. The power of a country in the world is no longer exercised through the type of economic or political system or ideas it radiates, but through the power to destroy the life of humanity.

Speaking now not to governments, but to the peoples of the world

Those of us who do not have that power of destruction, who instead have the power to sustain life on the planet, speak without much attention being paid, and often perhaps only to our own peoples.

That is why they do not listen to us when we vote for the genocide in Gaza to be stopped, even though we may be the majority of the presidents of the world and representatives of the greater part of humanity; they do not listen to us—a minority of presidents who can stop the bombing, that is, the presidents of the countries that can destroy humanity, do not listen to us.

If we ask for debt to be exchanged for climate action, the powerful minorities do not listen to us. If we ask them to set aside wars in order to concentrate on the rapid transformation of the world's economy so as to save life and the human species, they do not listen to us either. It is the power to destroy life that gives volume to a voice in the halls of the United Nations and gathers the majority of its representatives and delegates.

The bells toll today for the planet

The voice of nations is not heard when we ask to unite human effort in defense of existence. Here we speak, but we are not heard.

However, perhaps we no longer speak so that we may be heard and so that we may converse with the presidents of global power, but so that the peoples of the world may hear us.

Today things are worse than a year ago; 11 million hectares have burned in the Amazon rainforest, in just one month, due to global warming and the climate crisis.

Scientists said that if the Amazon rainforest burned, we would reach the point of climate no return, where human decisions to stop the collapse would already be futile.

Well then, the Amazon rainforest is burning. The bells are already tolling for the whole planet, for you, for us, for life and humanity, as Ernest Hemingway would say. The bells toll not only for you, but for all life. The end has begun.

The logic of genocide and inequality

A year ago I asked, in this very place, for a peace conference for Palestine, before the first bomb had even gone off; today we have 20,000 boys and girls killed under the bombs, and the presidents of the countries of human destruction laugh in these halls, aided by the communicative power of the world's media, which today are owned by big capital, reordering the world without democracy, without freedom.

Humanity's democratic project is dying along with life, while racists, supremacists, those who stupidly believe that Aryans are the superior race, are preparing to dominate the world by writing the terror of bombs upon the peoples.

Control of humanity on the basis of barbarism is under construction, and its demonstration is Gaza, Lebanon. When Gaza dies, all of humanity will die.

The people of God are all of humanity

It turns out that the people of God was not the people of Israel, nor is it the people of the United States of America; rather, the people of God are all of humanity, and the children of Gaza—they were humanity, God's chosen people.

They are killing God's chosen people, the children of humanity. There is a reason for this Armageddon of the contemporary world. In the unreason of governments that applaud genocide and that do not act quickly to change economies toward decarbonization, there is a logic. The logic is not found in the political world nor at this podium where all the presidents speak. The logic is out there, and it is called social inequality.

Oxfam says that the richest 1% of humanity has more wealth than 95% of all humanity combined. It is in this inequality reached—the greatest in our history as a species—that we find the logic of the massive destruction unleashed in the climate crisis and the logic of the bombs dropped by a criminal like (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu on Gaza.

Netanyahu is a hero to the richest 1% of humanity, because he is capable of showing that peoples can be destroyed under bombs.

The wealth of the 1% and the road to extinction

If we measure wealth in CO2 emitted rather than in dollars, we have the answer: the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for the advancing climate crisis and opposes ending the world of oil and coal, because that is their own source of wealth. Politicians, including the presidents of the most powerful countries on earth, simply obey them.

They pay for the campaigns, they own the media, they are the ones who hide the truth of science as in the film "Don't Look Up," they are the ones who dictate what is thought, what is said, and what must be forbidden and silenced.

In their power of prohibition and censorship they shout: Long live freedom, damn it! But it is only the freedom of the richest 1% of the world's population, which, in its mercantile and free sentiment, leads us to the destruction of the atmosphere and of life.

The free market was not freedom, as they said, but the maximization of death. That richest 1% of humanity, the powerful global oligarchy, is the one that allows bombs to be dropped on the women, elderly, and children of Gaza, of Lebanon, or of Sudan; or that economically blockades rebellious countries that do not fit into their domain, such as Cuba or Venezuela, because they need to show their power of destruction to the remaining 99% of humanity so that they will let them keep directing the power of the world and appropriating and accumulating ever more of their wealth.

The global oligarchy is leading humanity to its own extinction, and politics pays homage to it, completely abandoning the idea of freedom and the power of the peoples, the idea of democracy. The question that must be asked from this podium is whether the peoples will allow it.

There is no more time. Governments are incapable of stopping the extinction of life; today we must choose whether it is life or greed, whether it is humanity or capital.

I can do no more than say to the peoples of the world, from the weak voice of a country without weapons of mass destruction, without dollars, but beautiful for its natural and cultural diversity, the country of beauty and butterflies of every color, that this is no longer the hour of governments, but the hour of the peoples.

Time has already run out. Either we raise the flag of life or our peoples will fill with cemeteries, as the epidemic showed us. It is the hour of the peoples, and we must act locally and coordinate globally.

Stopping fossil capital

Fossil capital cannot continue; the peoples must stop it. The poison thrown into the atmosphere is fatal, and the chimneys that emit it must be stopped. Every corner of the world can be a battle against those chimneys.

A century ago a red flag was raised in the hands of the working multitudes, speaking of a revolution against capital. That world is over.

Lost in the giantism of States and the absence of freedom, the red flag did not find its place in the history of humanity. But today, with even more reason, no longer to defend a class, a system of ideas, but to defend collective life, we once again need the flag raised—perhaps no longer red, but of all colors, a flag of all humanity to defend its own existence on the planet.

Collective intelligence

Perhaps the word socialism today has a new meaning. Brains, which are the true basis of labor, are today more connected than ever. Today human knowledge is more collective than ever. Helping one another has always been the magic that allowed us to survive for a million years on this planet. Individuals alone are weak and end up in the hands of fentanyl, the drug of death, of human defeat.

We people are strong if we help one another, and this help reaches planetary scale; mutual aid, the collective construction of knowledge, humanity as a new political subject, is the basis of a new meaning of socialism. We are the most advanced form of life, intelligent life. Intelligent life must be defended, and other forms of life must be defended from a global oligarchy that attacks it.

A new wealth must be built, no longer based on oil, but on intensity, on creative and free labor that allows for the extremely high productivity now achieved, including artificial intelligence, which must be controlled by a global public power.

Productivity allows for free and creative time, the networked joining of human brains, the greatest power ever achieved, and this neural network of humanity is what can allow us to win with the flag raised, the flag of life. I am no longer speaking to (US President Joe) Biden, to (French President Emmanuel) Macron, to (German Chancellor Olaf) Scholz, to (Chinese President) Xi Jinping, or to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.

From China I take its idea of a dialogue among civilizations; from Europe, its project of a social pact; from the United States, its love of the original democracy of its founding fathers; from South America, its hurricane-like diversity, its flag-bearing horseman, its Simón Bolívar; from Africa, its drums that call us to communicate with the spirits of nature; from Jesus, the idea of universal love, his joining of light with life.

From these civilizational sources and more, present in all the peoples of the world, we must draw the strength for the greatest battle for life in human history. That battle is undoubtedly a world revolution.

Army of life

We need to build the greatest army of all time, made up of warriors—men and women—of life. The army of life will not have the weapons of the global oligarchy, will not have nuclear weapons, will not compete for weapons nor have the overflowing money of the banks, nor the power to destroy children in the oligarchy's genocides; but it will have the greatest power of all: the power of a united humanity that will not allow its existence on the planet to be taken from it.

There is only one infinitesimal point of life, amid millions of light years around the universe, and it is called Earth; and on it there is a higher life, which is intelligent life, humanity. We cannot let that pearl of the universe be extinguished.

Without life, only inert darkness would reign, and it is that inert darkness that fills the heart and soul of the global oligarchy and its idols of clay. It falls to humanity to wage the battle.

The hour of the peoples

It is the hour of the peoples. If governments could not do it, as is shown here, and decided to play with bombs and senseless wars and kill boys and girls, games of power, then it is the hour to take the solution to humanity's great problems into the hands of the people themselves, the ordinary people of humanity.

Instead of addressing insensitive rulers, let us address ourselves, the common people. Let us address the peoples in order to coordinate common actions, the demonstrations of another, democratic power.

In the midst of this power of humanity turned into active conscience, new governments, new leaderships will appear. If life overcomes its extinction, it will no longer be the global oligarchy that governs the world; it will be overthrown in order to build a global democracy.

A new history is about to begin.

Thank you, you are very kind.