Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro told the United Nations’ General Assembly that humanity is being threatened by its “addiction to money.”
In his first address before the UN’s General Assembly, Petro claimed that both “the war against drugs and the climate crisis have failed” because of unhinged capitalism.
“Wars haven’t served but as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis” and “the worst of addictions to power and to oil,” according to the president.
The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths… but coal and oil on the other hand must be protected, even if their consumption could extinguish all mankind.
President Gustavo Petro
“You want less drugs? Think less about profits and more about love. Think about the rational use of power,” Petro said in a fierce attack on the world’s current capitalist system.
“You will see the jungles and democracies die” for “denying the truth” that “the cause of the disaster” caused by climate change “is capital,” said the president.
The logic to come together in order to always consume more, always produce more, and so that a few earn even more is what is causing the climate crisis.
President Gustavo Petro
“You don’t care about my country,” Petro decried, “unless it’s to poison its jungles, imprison its men and drag its women into exclusion.”
The president additionally condemned world leaders’ failure to allocate funds to prevent the Amazon rainforest while allocating funds for ongoing wars.
I call on you to integrally save the Amazon rainforest with resources that can be allocated worldwide to life. If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it is more important to allocate funds to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free up our own budgetary spaces and with them carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet.
President Gustavo Petro
The president invited Latin American leaders at the UN to defend the Americas’ rainforests and rethink drug policy with or without support of “the north.”
