Colombian President Gustavo Petro devoted much of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday to call for an end to the United States’s “war on drugs” while denouncing the consumption of “poisonous” coal and oil.
Petro’s address to the United Nations was the first of his presidency, as the election that brought him to power as Colombia’s first leftist leader occurred in June. In the speech, he announced that he came from a land of “bloodstained beauty” but defended the growth and cultivation of coca plants in his country – a major driver of violence for over half a century. Efforts to eradicate the drug used to produce cocaine, he claimed, are destroying the Colombian Amazon.
“There in those jungles, planetary oxygen is released and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of those plants that absorbs CO2, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth,” Petro claimed. “At any cost, its destruction is sought. It is an Amazonian plant. It is the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas. As in a paradoxical crossroads, the forest that is trying to be saved is at the same time destroyed.”
Naikelly Delgado, 36, a Venezuelan migrant working as a “Raspachin” (farmer collector of coca leaves), poses for a picture at a coca plantation in the Catatumbo region, Norte de Santander Department, in Colombia, on February 9, 2019. Many Venezuelan who fled their country stopped being workers, taxi drivers, fishermen or sellers to collect the leaf that is used to make cocaine, an illegal activity that they had barely heard about and that tears them physically and morally. (LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images)
“To destroy the coca plant they release poisons, glyphosate en masse that runs through the waters. They arrest their growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, a million Latin Americans are murdered and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America,” he claimed. “‘Destroy the plant that kills,’ they cry from the north [the United States], but the plant is just one more plant among the millions that perish when they unleash fire onto the jungle.”
Petro also went on to denounce carbon and oil as more poisonous to humanity than cocaine — a recurring assertion during his presidential campaign.
“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he asked. “The opinion of [those in] power has commanded that cocaine is the poison and must be persecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and more by the mixtures created as a result of its clandestine state. But, instead, coal and oil must be protected, even if their use can extinguish all mankind.”
He continued by denouncing the United States’s war on drugs and demanding its end.
“The war on drugs has lasted 40 years,” Petro said. “If we do not correct course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose due to fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America.”
Petro did not offer any evidence or sourcing for his claim that the war on drugs is causing fentanyl deaths, nor an explanation for where the 2.8 million statistic originated.
“You will see millions of Afro-Americans being imprisoned in their private prisons. The imprisoned Afro will become a business for prison companies,” he claimed.
“Reducing drug use does not require wars. It requires us all to build a better society: a more supportive, more affectionate society, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and the new slaveries,” he concluded.
Petro also proposed a reduction of his country’s external debt, estimated to be about $176 million as of June, so that the country is capable of “saving the Amazon jungle.”
“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate the money to weapons than to life, then reduce the external debt to free up our own budget spaces and with them carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet,” Petro suggested.
Lastly, Petro called for peace between Ukraine and Russia without denouncing either side.
“There is no total peace without social, economic and environmental justice. We are at war, too, with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace,” he said as he concluded his speech.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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