Colombia

Mr. President of the Assembly, this is my last speech as President here. This is already the fourth. In the first, I announced to the Assembly that it was very possible that a conflict would break out alongside Ukraine, in Palestine. I asked that a peace conference be held.

Those of us who have no bombs or large budgets are not listened to here, but, four years later, today, the horror of the situation in Palestine led me to think that the same thing, or almost the same thing, could happen in the Colombian Caribbean, when missiles are fired at unarmed young people at sea.

So, we are now facing a different situation, perhaps a more global one. Today the barbarity belongs to the planet, today it falls on all of humanity. The missiles fired at 17 unarmed young people in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, perhaps some of them Colombian. The persecution, imprisonment, chaining, and expulsion of millions of migrants. The missiles that fall on the 70,000 people in Gaza and kill them.

The lack of action on the climate crisis, whose very words are being erased by order of Trump, are linked and obey the same cause. Migration is an excuse for a rich, white, and racist society to believe itself the superior race and to ignore that its leaders are leading it, along with all of humanity, to the abyss of its own extinction.

They say the missiles in the Caribbean were to stop drugs. A lie. Said right here, in this very place, in 2023 and 2024 were the years in which the most cocaine was seized and more than 700 drug-trafficking kingpins were extradited to the United States and Europe. I extradited them, and my Government seized the cocaine.

And we did not fire a single missile or kill a single young person. The years in which I proved that it is more effective to voluntarily substitute coca-leaf crops than to forcibly eradicate them with glyphosate and force against Colombia's poor peasants. I have replaced the failed and violent war on drugs with an effective anti-narco-trafficking policy, which is different — one that does not confuse the dead substance with the greedy person.

But they need violence to dominate Colombia and Latin America. They need to destroy dialogue and impose and launch murderous missiles at poor young people in the Caribbean. The anti-drug policy is not meant to stop the cocaine that reaches the United States.

The anti-drug policy is meant to dominate the peoples of the South in general. It does not look at the drug, it looks at power and domination. That is why I speak before you as a president decertified by President Trump himself, without him having any right to do so — neither human nor divine, and without mental justification.

They want to violate and force tens of thousands of peasants through the government of the United States, which is influenced by Colombian mafioso politicians.

Hundreds of thousands of Colombian peasants have been massacred just as children are massacred in Gaza.

The massacres were carried out in Colombia by politicians who were senators, presidents, and ministers, linked to and bribed by the Colombian drug-trafficking mafia.

Allies at the same time with the extreme right of Florida in the United States and, now, allies of the Trump government, allies for decades of the cocaine drug kingpins in Colombia, true "esquifos" ["skiffs"/small-time crooks], as the Italians say.

Allies of skiffs make anti-drug policy from Washington, United States. I do not know if Trump is aware that his foreign policy toward Colombia, Venezuela, and the Caribbean is advised by Colombians who are political allies of the cocaine mafia.

I myself denounced these politicians of narco-paramilitarism by name, by name and for a decade in the Congress of the Republic as a senator, and they tried to kill me many times for it, and they wanted me not to become president and to silence me, and now they want a new progressive government not to continue. And that is why they decertify me almost personally, and slander Colombia.

In Colombia the highest amount of cocaine in the entire history of the world has been seized, and it was done by this government, and they decertify me.

The drug traffickers live somewhere else, and it is not in Latin America. Trump launches missiles at unarmed boats of migrants and accuses them of being drug traffickers and terrorists without them having a single weapon to defend themselves, when the drug traffickers live in New York, right here, a few blocks away, and in Miami.

And they make deals with the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), where they allow them to traffic in Africa, in Europe, Russia, or China, but not in the United States, a country that stops the growth of cocaine consumption without reducing it, only because its drug-addicted patients — and they are sick — moved on to consuming the deadly drug of humanity's counterculture in times of extinction from the climate crisis: fentanyl.

This fentanyl is produced within the industrial apparatus of the United States, here, near here, for consumers it is American self-consumption that derives the worst of what has ever been understood about drugs in the history of humanity since we first knew wine, alcohol, or beer.

Addicted to fentanyl and to gasoline, total poisons of life in the world. Worse the gasoline than the fentanyl.

In Colombia we have managed to stop the growth of the rate, the growth rate of coca-leaf crops, which had been running at 43% annually under the government of President Iván Duque, and I have brought it down this year to 3%, and they did not decertify Duque, who had a drug-trafficking financier in his campaign, but they decertified Petro, because he says things, and truths.

So the anti-drug policy is not for the public health of society but for the politics of power. They do not want light to be shed in Latin America and for the hour of the peoples to arrive again. The young people killed with missiles in the Caribbean were not from the Tren de Aragua, which perhaps no one here even knows the name of, nor from Hamas; they were Caribbean people, possibly Colombians.

And if they were Colombians, with the forgiveness of those who dominate the United Nations, criminal proceedings should be opened against those officials from the United States, including the highest official who gave the order, President Trump, who authorized the firing of missiles against young people who simply wanted to escape poverty. Young people on a boat, even if they had an illicit cargo, were not drug traffickers, they were simple poor young people from Latin America who have no other option.

— or worsened — and is leading its society to the Dantesque death of the drug that kills the brain and the lung in this mass death of humanity.

Genocide in Gaza

Trump not only allows missiles to fall on young people in the Caribbean, not only imprisons and chains migrants, but allows missiles to be launched against young children, women, and the elderly in Gaza — he becomes complicit in the genocide, because it is genocide, and it must be shouted again and again.

This chamber is a mute witness, and an accomplice, to a genocide in today's world. When we believed it was only something that belonged to Hitler, Trump does not speak of democracy, does not speak of the climate crisis, does not speak of life, he only threatens and kills and lets tens of thousands be killed.

In my government, in Colombia, by contrast, we have not increased the homicide rate. We have the lowest unemployment rate of the century in the country, we have the lowest poverty rate of the century in our statistics, and we have pushed our agriculture to real annual growth of 10%, and our industry to 5% annually, and tourists arrived like never before, by the millions, to look at our enormous beauty.

In the country of beauty and of natural, human, and cultural diversity, we seek peace by talking with narcos and rebels — I am not ashamed to talk, to talk always to save lives, placing as a principle the total eradication of illicit economies and the eradication of coca-leaf crops by the will of the peasants themselves, who are tired of violence.

We do not let ourselves be bribed by the narcos, as indeed happened in past Colombian governments, and we have already voluntarily eradicated 25,000 hectares, we are succeeding in our new policy, which is not a drug policy, it is an anti-narco-trafficking policy, which is different.

We thank the countries that have helped us sow peace: Qatar, Cuba, Mexico, the Vatican State, Norway, Brazil, and Venezuela. We do not thank those who want to lead us into war among ourselves.

Listen, ladies and gentlemen of the world, Latin America is not just cocaine or terrorists, or drug traffickers; Latin America has the potential capacity of 1,400 gigawatts a year of clean electrical energy based on water, wind, and sun, while the United States, in the north, demands here every year 1,200 gigawatts of energy that today are 70% fossil-based, that is, based on coal, gas, and oil.

Latin America, if it develops its clean energy potential, could clean up the entire fossil energy matrix of the United States. Listen to that — all that is missing is the money, and the greatest contribution to overcoming the climate crisis would be produced.

Today, with almost no progress made between the potential of clean energy and the enormous absorbing sponge of the Amazon rainforest, Latin America would be the human vanguard that could take the first certain and forceful step to save the life of the planet and all of humanity; only 600 billion dollars are needed to develop its potential.

Africa could do the same with Europe. The sum of this fundamental decarbonization effort would give us one trillion two hundred billion dollars — or 1,200,000,000 trillion as it is said in English — this money already sits stored in the vaults of the United States, Europe, and China, but not a single dollar moves, it is "not profitable."

Or worse, it can still be very profitable in terms of human life, including life in the United States, Europe, and China, but they do not want to become interdependent with Latin America and Africa; they know that linking the clean energy of Latin America and Africa to the fossil economies of the North not only decarbonizes the planet, saves it from climate collapse, but also changes global power.

The one who speaks here sometimes, but speaks every day, with bombs and not with words, turns decarbonization, brings democracy back to power globally, and changes the relations of production, because life and humanity appear first as a priority over greed.

Greed is the poison of life, it is an antagonistic contradiction, as Mao (Zedong, politician, philosopher, intellectual, military strategist, founder of the Communist Party and of the Republic of China) once said — Chinese, but not thinking of bosses and workers, but of the contradiction between greed and the very life of planet Earth.

According to science, we have 10 years before falling into a point of no return, 10 years, and once we pass that point nothing can be done, we will only watch the catastrophes and feel them, even within our own families, because it will be — if I may say — irreversible, the extinction of life, including human life.

Irreversibility of the process — no technology, no political or social force, no human mind will be able to do anything to stop the collapse, and we have 10 years left, science says, but here they do not believe in science, said one of the most powerful men in the world, "I do not believe in science" — and that is called irrationalism, and Germany, the country of the great philosophers, of Feuerbach, of Hegel, of Kant, once filled itself philosophically with irrationalism.

And today the United States is filling itself with irrationalism, and that was the prelude to Hitler in 1933.

The solution is to stop consuming coal, oil, gas, hydrocarbons and move quickly to water, sun, green hydrogen, wind — but the word "decarbonization" now sounds subversive at the conferences of the powerful countries' groups, of the G7, the G20, and in Davos, Switzerland, among the mega-rich, just as the word "democracy" sounded subversive five centuries ago.

Invest in decarbonization

Even here, in New York, in Cartagena, in Bogotá, or in Paris, and much more so in Madrid, that money I am speaking of here — 600 billion dollars, 1.2 trillion — is one or two zeros greater than the figure promised by the developed countries.

Give, and it turns out those are alms, and they did not fulfill what they promised since the Paris COP, because decarbonization does not interest them, and the excess of zeros in the figure lies in the meager loans from multilateral banking — that is all it is, pure, harmless alms, ideological pretense, thinking that the profitability of capital cleans the atmosphere and saves life — ideological, fantastical lies, fetishes so that we do not look up and do not act as humanity.

The climate crisis requires prioritizing, in all public budgets, investment in decarbonization and adaptation, and this requires an entirely different global financial policy and the abolition of debt risk premiums.

Who said that the countries that emit the most greenhouse gases — like this one, the second or first in the world — are not risky, while the countries that absorb CO2, that have jungles and much water, and that absorb the North's CO2 in the South, are the risky ones, simply because the market says the opposite? It is not because it is right, it is because it is wrong and heading toward the abyss of life.

Debt in the poorest countries must be forgiven, and external debt payments must be exchanged for investment in the adaptation and mitigation of the climate crisis. If you gentlemen of China, and Germany, and the United States, and Wall Street, and Paris, and the London Stock Exchange want to collect the interest on external debt in our countries, you will find cemeteries and dead people, and when you go to collect it, you too will become cemetery and dead. That money is of no use amid corpses.

Here is another subversive word: "plan," "global plan" — the word was forgotten because of the market, they said there was no need to plan, when planning is a human trait, it is anathema; so much false religious belief was unleashed over the market, a fundamentalist belief thinking that the market led to happiness, said Walras, the Swiss economist — and the abyss.

But what the market leads to is not happiness, but death and the abyss, as we already see today. Walras was wrong, neoliberalism was wrong from the start, and we have been 50 years guiding our countries under completely erratic and anti-scientific formulas, and we have not changed them.

The plan must be binding on national states, carried out within a global democracy, supervised in its compliance by the Security Council, without veto — for let us know once and for all that the market does not solve the climate crisis, let us know it once and for all, because the market itself produced it: it was capital — which is an unequal human relationship between whoever owns the machine that is hungry for coal and oil, and the salaried worker, man or woman, who has to produce more and more things so that the boss can sell — those things made with the boss's machine, which needs more and more oil, which is what produced the climate crisis.

Making more, selling more, earning more, more and more, and using more and more, then, coal, oil, up to our days, but not for eternity, because oil and coal have reached their end, which, perhaps, is the end of capital. If it is not the end of capital, it will be the end of humanity and of life.

So, the owner of capital is a human being of power, and not a thing, not a fetish. That human being, with his greed, with his total enslavement to greed, is the one who will seek to have it approved here that more and more oil be sought, that in every country more and more oil be sought, no matter the poisoning of the atmosphere with CO2, which is the poisoning of all life on the planet.

Drill, drill, and drill, they say, without mercy. So, capital or life, my friends, greed or life, barbarism or local and global democracy, freedom or death, as Bolívar used to say, and he raised his red, black, and also white flag — liberty, red, death, black, white, peace.

World revolution

What is possible is a world revolution of the peoples, which is what is needed to positively overcome the climate crisis and not let it turn from crisis into global collapse — it is a revolution of united peoples, of civilizations, who must dialogue more than the states themselves; it is a revolution of humanity in order to remain alive on the planet and free, perhaps allied with some governments that want to defend life today.

The United Nations sees its own crisis and the need for its transformation; here nation-states gather that no longer have power, that no matter how much they vote, they are not heeded, because the nation-state has also reached its decadence, perhaps its end.

It was invented some centuries ago and it no longer works, and it no longer works because capital itself became global, not national; the socialism of (José) Stalin (politician, military figure, revolutionary, and Soviet dictator) should have become global, not national, but Stalin lacked the understanding for that and believed more in the tribe, and condemned at Yalta a world revolution in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and it might have also been Latin America and others.

Humanity is the new political subject that is emerging, not the nation-state, and therefore the United Nations must return to and transform itself into a united, though diverse, humanity — a new political subject is appearing in human history, and it is important, and it seems spectacular to me, and it is that we are moving beyond the idea of the nation-state to become humanity.

But that humanity, in order to be united and act as one, must have democracy throughout the world, must have permanent dialogue amid diversity — it is the difference that drives us toward the possibility of an effective coordination of action on a global, humanity-wide scale, one that dialogues.

Yes, civil humanity, yes, deeply democratic humanity, yes, hopefully, a humanity of free people, which is its definition, its synonym, because there cannot be an enslaved humanity. Enslaved humanity is not humanity, it is beast — it is the beast that enslaves, that chains migrants, that launches missiles at young people, that riddles children and girls with missiles in a town very close to where Jesus was born.

This can no longer be resolved with states that talk and do not act, it cannot be resolved with rulers bribed by oil and willing to launch missiles at the peoples of the South. A new political subject then appears: humanity, united and diverse in its cultures. While collapse approaches, and while the old, white societies of Europe and the United States keep applauding their new fashionable Hitlers, they listen neither to their young people, nor their children, nor to humanity, nor to the stars, nor to their grandparents who died as heroes in the fields of Europe, truly fighting against Hitler and his criminal idea of a superior race.

Today they do the same thing Hitler did: they build concentration camps for migrants and applaud electoral majorities and say that migrants are of an inferior race, and they collectivize blame onto them as they did with the Jews, and they call them terrorists and inferior and thieves, all drug traffickers, they say, the most powerful of the countries that do not accept genocide. That is why I invite the nations of the world and their peoples above all, as part of humanity, to unite their armies and weapons.

Palestine must be freed. I invite the armies of Asia, of the Slavic peoples who so heroically defeated Hitler, the Latin American armies of Bolívar, of Garibaldi — who also had one in Italy — of Martí, of Artigas, of Santa Cruz. Words are no longer enough at the hour of Bolívar's sword of liberty or death, because they are not only going to bomb Gaza, not only the Caribbean, as they already do, but humanity itself, which cries out for freedom, because from Washington and NATO they kill democracy and revive tyranny and totalitarianism on a global scale.

We must raise the red-and-black flag of liberty or death that Bolívar raised, without forgetting the white that he raised alongside the red-and-black — the color of peace as hope, so that there may be hope for life on Earth and in the heart of humanity. The United States no longer teaches democracy, but kills it in its migrants and its greed. The United States teaches tyranny.

The United Nations must begin its transformation by stopping the genocide in Gaza with the effectiveness of an army for the salvation of the world, voted on by the United Nations General Assembly and without veto. After saving Gaza, we will move on to the plan to decarbonize the planet's economy, so that it becomes a fact democratically built on a global scale and founds a global democracy — and let the body that oversees its rapid implementation be the Security Council, but without vetoes, and let it be binding on the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the private financial system, because of the enormous capacity the national and global financial system has to centralize capital. It is from there that humanity can regulate capital in order to subordinate it to life and to humanity — a capital regulated and subordinated to life and to people.

Along this path, the United Nations will move from being an alliance of states to being an alliance of peoples and diverse cultures, which are the true component of humanity. If we overcome the climate crisis — and we will only do so united as humanity — we will also achieve that the United Nations takes the step toward an assembly of peoples, seeking that every person on the planet be free, seeking that the minds of every person reach their maximum potential and interconnect across the planet, because that great brain of humanity, as a powerful intelligence, increasingly illuminated by ever-deeper science, will be able not only to save life on the planet but also to fulfill humanity's mission, expanding life to the stars. A united and free humanity can look to the stars and reach them, just as the Roman legionaries once thought, long ago, when the Latin words "ad astra, ad astra" — to the stars — were coined, always at the hour of liberty or death, and it is real, the death dealt by missiles, but it is also real, the freedom in the human heart and its capacity for unity, for rebellion, and for existence.

Thank you very much.