YouSaid · the spoken record

Gustavo Petro Urrego

lines on the record: 36
first: 2022-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 2
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“equally forgotten, had already said as much in the depth of their ideas. What a beautiful horizon amid the darkness and storms of today — a horizon that tastes of hope. The goals of life and justice can be reached on the path that leads to global democracy and the reassessment of the common good, achieved along a pathway that belongs to everyone. I want my baby grandchildren. Luna. Victoria and Luka, and my younger daughter. Antonella. to be able to live far from the apocalypse and the times of extinction. I want them to live in a time in which humans learned how to stop killing each other on the planet and. through the diversity of their cultures, succeeded in understanding each other and fulfilling their mission to spread the virus of life among the stars of the universe.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“That is why the President of the land of beauty proposes that we reform the global financial system, the International Monetary Fund and the multilateral banking system, end economic blockades and channel private equity funds. If the debt of all countries were reduced by paying what is owed to the lenders through the allocation of special drawing rights by the IMF. there would be a decrease in global public debt and a real increase in public budgets and funds. In that way. we would be able to finance a Marshall Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals and for social and environmental justice on the planet, a plan to overcome, mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, which is the crisis of life. This would be to restore Keynes from oblivion. That wise old man. and other wise men before him.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“but we must let the echo of the public, of the State, of humankind, of multilateralism resound once more — that is to say. let the word “change” resound because it will be crucial if we are to save life. Saving life requires an era of change, and it is urgent. Today change is synonymous with life. Today, in order to live, young people of all colours must bear the standard of change, of transformation, of a new humankind. It is democracy, not authoritarianisms. that increasingly resembles Nazis. It is world democracy, it is planning, it is the power of States, this time facing not war but how to plan life. It entails planning the transition to a decarbonized economy and financing it. The decarbonized economy. I have no doubt, will be a more humane and just economy.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The mega-crisis of life can be resolved through a democracy with global reach, a deeper democracy that should not hesitate to define States and societies and formulate a great Marshall Plan for the revitalization of the planet. The market will help us somewhat, but we cannot ask a mechanism devoid of humanity for solutions to a problem that it created to begin with. Yes. private funds can help, but they will be limited by their own logic. It is public funds that will have to bear the brunt of the effort, and those funds are presently weakened by debt. The great battle of our generation, that of defending life for our children and grandchildren, can be fully financed only by the public sector, by all of us — freeing the public sector to save life. Many may not like it.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The financing of life is the intravenous medicine that must be infused into the veins of the economies and societies of the world to tackle the challenge of leaving coal and oil under the earth, in their places, which are the true veins of the Earth, as Roberto Cobaria, a Colombian Uwa indigenous person, told the world 30 years ago. In his words, extracting oil is drawing blood from the Earth, and doing it will cause life to perish. Most of the investment in decarbonizing the world’s economy will come from public funds, from societal efforts, by bringing States together to bring humankind together — what is now known as multilateralism — to govern the Earth through the lens of democracy rather than the lens of empire. Empires excel not at saving life but at starting wars.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“and that framework for covering the decarbonization of the entire world is a narrow one. Those in Government and power who still believe that the climate crisis, the crisis of life itself, can be overcome with a few affordable credits are mistaken. In their delusion, they propose that countries of the Earth that are already over-indebted by disease and greed can acquire more credits in order to overcome a problem created solely by the smokestacks of the North. But the crisis of life, the mega-crisis, cannot be overcome by acquiring more debt.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“We have been to Paris to see if crowds are still clamouring for liberty, equality and fraternity, and we have been to Washington to talk to the President and see if the peoples of North and South America might come together again, remembering that in days of old. more than two centuries ago. we met in history to talk about liberty, equality, democracy and the Republic. And we have talked in every tone of voice about getting to the root of the problem of and resolving the climate crisis. If fossil capitalism is not financed, it will die. Its death throes will be harsh, but that is necessary if humankind, nature and life are to continue to exist. Decarbonized capitalism will have to be financed — we already know that green capital will move only where there is profit. That is its law.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“As President of a land of beauty. I propose to the General Assembly that we do two simple things to make up for lost time — end the war and reform the global financial system. From the peace conferences on Ukraine and Palestine, we should go out and build the reform that we already discussed back there, in the Amazon jungle, where the largest river on Earth, which crosses the largest jungle on Earth, meets the sea. We have discussed it in Brasilia, and we have been to Kenya to join our brother peoples of black Africa, from whence we came at a time of another great injustice perpetrated by the powerful — slavery.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“They ended up leading their society to the drug of neoliberalism and competition, the drug of choice of Manhattan yuppies — cocaine — and locked up millions of blacks and Latinos in cold, privatized prisons. A million Latin Americans were murdered and democracies destroyed in our America. They never managed to jail the Manhattan yuppies, and now they are faced with the glorious result of drug prohibition, fentanyl, which kills not 4.000 but 100.000 young people a year in the United States. Injustices were sown, with the worst of them all condemning humankind to war. That is why social justice in the world today is in such a bad state. The problem is that this was not a question of whether we might be socialists or progressives, but rather one of determining where the time left to live on the planet was going.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“They do not have $100 billion to give to countries to protect them from floods, storms and hurricanes, but they do have it to spend in a single day to enable Russians and Ukrainians to kill each other. At this point we do not need $100 billion — we need $3 trillion to overcome the climate crisis, and the bill is rising with every second that passes on Earth. Injustice has been sown, and by arresting peasant farmers who grow cannabis and coca leaf instead of addressing the loneliness faced by the young in the countries with the greatest economic and military power in the history of humankind, those young people have turned to fentanyl, the drug of death. Those countries wanted a war against the drugs of choice of the rebellious youth who opposed the Viet Nam War. the hippies’ marijuana and LSD.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Humankind will not achieve social justice by 2030. because what has been sown on our planet is injustice. What we have seen happening in the past few years is injustice, the injustice of turning a vaccine against a deadly disease into a commodity by hoarding it in rich countries. Latin America — a mere 8 per cent of the world’s population — accounted for 26 per cent of coronavirus disease deaths. Who said that health must be a business and not a right? Millions of elderly people and millions generally died because the vaccine was a commodity and not a good of humankind. Those rich countries have failed to deliver on their own promise to finance climate change adaptation.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Today’s generation must decide and act as soon as possible to overcome the enormous hurricane that has been unleashed against life, from the dark but powerful sewers of greed, from the hurricane of capital that only looks at profit and that has engulfed the planet and the very basis of existence. I propose that we end the war in order to defend life from the climate crisis, the mother of all crises. The Summit that we have just held was designed to assess the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were set by Governments for 2030. Well, it is easy to make that assessment. Those human development goals are not going to be achieved. We are far from achieving them — in fact, we have regressed. To give the United Nations human development goals a simpler name. I would call them social and environmental justice.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Indigenous and Black people, people from the countryside, young people of all colours — decided to elect and send to speak here before the Assembly. I propose to end the war so that we have time to save ourselves. I propose that the United Nations convene two peace conferences as soon as possible, one on Ukraine and the other on Palestine, not because there are no other wars in the world, as in my country, but because it would show how to build peace in all regions of the planet, because both — and only both — would put an end to hypocrisy as a political practice, because we could be sincere, a virtue without which we cannot be warriors for life.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“They forgot that the same reasons that are advanced to defend Zelenskyy are the same reasons that should be used to defend Palestine. They forgot that, to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, all wars must be brought to an end. But they helped to start one because it was convenient for world Powers in their game of thrones, in their hunger games, and they forgot to end the other war because it was not convenient for them. What is the difference. I ask. between Ukraine and Palestine? Is it not time to end both wars, and others, and to make the most of the short time we have to build pathways to save life on the planet? As President of Colombia, the country of beauty, whom a group within humankind — comprising millions of workers, women from working-class neighbourhoods.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The exodus has increased over this past year, showing how much the crisis of life is advancing. But while the clock ticks away the minutes that define life or death on our planet, instead of sitting down and taking the time to discuss how to defend life and then using our increased knowledge to expand life in our universe, we decide to waste our time killing one another. We are not thinking about how to expand life in the stars, but how to end it on our planet. We have devoted ourselves to war. We have been called to war. Latin America has been called on to deliver machinery and men to go to the battlefields. They forgot that our countries were invaded several times by the same people who today talk about fighting against invasions. They forgot that Iraq. Syria and Libya were invaded for oil.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Billions of people will defy armies and will change the Earth to do that. The exodus of the peoples to the North is an exact reflection of the dimension of the failure of Governments. This past year has been a time of defeat for Governments, a defeat for humankind. The exodus across borders has increased. Dogs and hounds have been set on immigrants. People have been put on horseback to pursue them, with whips in their hands, with restraints and chains. They have built prisons. So much has hatred grown for the foreign, the strange, that prisons have even been built at sea so that men and women of the South do not set foot on the land of white people, who still believe themselves to be a superior race and who. nostalgic for that, recall at their elections a leader who has even said so and who killed millions as a result.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“They make a kind of work of art on the canvas of the Earth, a flow of tones, sounds, a mixture of clothes and cultures in an amalgam that remembers its beginnings. It is an amalgam in a great march from the South to the North. The human exodus has begun. Today there are tens of millions. Tomorrow — by 2070. according to scientific experts — the figure will have reached 3 billion. That is 3 billion people fleeing their beloved homes because those homes will be uninhabitable. In my homeland. Colombia, the country of beauty, the country of an explosion of life, only deserts will remain by 2070. The people will go to the North, no longer attracted by the glitter of wealth but by something simpler and more vital — water. Since the early stages of humankind, people have gone to where water is. to the North.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Hunger continues. The recession is increasing. And the climate crisis is showing its teeth, claiming thousands of lives and heating land and sea as never before. This has been a year of loss for humankind, which is hastening on and marching steadily towards the era of extinction. All those crises are in fact just one crisis: the crisis of life. It seems that world leaders have become the enemies of life. The crisis of life is being expressed in one devastating indicator. It began at the furthest corners of the Earth, far from the most remote regions. It is a silent march of people of different cultures who are mingling on their way like an infinitely nuanced painting. The colours are mixing together in an uncontainable stream. A multitude of all the colours is moving along trails and through the seas and jungles.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“One week ago. I was in Santiago de Chile for the commemoration of the 50 years that had passed since the homicidal and bloody coup against President Salvador Allende. From there I went to my country, a poor neighbourhood of Medellin, where in the past the mafia would lure young people with the possibility of learning computer programming. I then went to Havana, an unjustly blockaded country whose inclusion on the list of terrorist-sponsoring countries for the simple reason of helping to make peace in Colombia was suggested and accomplished by the President of my country. And now I am here to address the General Assembly. Over the year that has passed since my previous address at the United Nations (see A/77/PV.4). we have seen only a deepening of what the wealthy Davos meeting participants call a polycrisis. War continues.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“On behalf of Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save lives on this Earth of ours. There can be no total peace without social, economic and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. If there is no peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. And without social justice, there is no social peace.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“For those members that do not have the capacity to finance the funding of the revitalization of the forests or for which it is harder to allocate money to life than to weapons, I call on them to reduce foreign debt in order to release our own budget spaces, through which the work of saving humankind and life on the planet can be undertaken. We can do it if they do not want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I call on all members of the General Assembly, and in particular I call on all Latin America, to engage in dialogue to end the war. Do not pressure us to take a side in the war. It is time for peace. Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other. Let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings us all closer to the end of time in our great orgy of irrationality.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, lies the real addiction of this current phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit and to money. That is the massive deadly machinery that could wipe out humankind. As President of one of the most beautiful — and blood-drenched and exploited — countries on Earth, I call for an end to the war on drugs and for our people to be allowed to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America to come together with one voice in order to defeat the irrational behaviour that is making martyrs of our physical bodies. I call on the members of the General Assembly to save the entirety of the Amazon forest using resources that can be allocated worldwide to ensuring life.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“They harnessed the logic of the expanded accumulation of capital to the use of coal- and petrol- fired engines, and they unleashed a hurricane: the chemical changes in our atmosphere will be more and more widespread and deadly. Now in a parallel word, the expanded accumulation of capital is the expanded accumulation of death. From the land of forests and beauty — where they decided to make the Amazon forest the enemy and to extradite and imprison its farmers — I urge the members of the General Assembly to stop the war and put an end to the climate disaster. Here in the Amazon forest, humankind has failed. Behind the conflagrations burning there, behind the poisoning, lies the failure of humankind as a civilization.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“They say that the market will save us from what the market itself created. Humankind, like Frankenstein, lets the market — and greed — act without planning, abandoning logic and reason. It subordinates human reason to greed. What is the point of war when what we need to do is save the human species? What is the point of NATO and empires when the end of intelligence is near? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people, and the members of the General Assembly may be assured that it is not the planet but capital that will be to blame. The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of relationships geared to consuming more and more and producing more and more so that some of us earn more and more is the cause of the climate disaster.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“When the members of the General Assembly see starving and thirsty people migrating north by the millions, to where the water is, they enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns and shoot at them. They expel them as if they were not human beings, five times worse than the mentality of those whose policies created the gas chambers and concentration camps. They have brought us back on a global scale to 1933 — the day of the great triumph of the assault on reason. Do they not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on their countries is to bring back the flow of nutrients into the water that fills the rivers and fields? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that spread devastation, but they do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“Science set the alarm bells ringing, and we stopped listening to them. War has served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money into funds to save humankind, when it was necessary to move away as soon as possible from coal and oil — they invented one war after another. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas. In the twenty-first century, they discovered the worst of their addictions: money and oil. Wars have served for them as an excuse to not take action to combat the climate crisis and shown them how dependent they are on what will finish off the human species.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“Reducing drug consumption does not require wars or weapons. It requires us all to build better societies — more caring, affectionate societies, in which the intensity of life protects us from addictions and new forms of slavery. Do the members of the General Assembly want fewer drugs? Let them think about less money, more love. Let them think about the rational exercise of power. Let them not taint the beauty of my homeland with their poisons. Let them help us, without hypocrisy, to save the Amazon forest in order to ensure humankind’s existence on the planet. They brought the scientists together, who spoke with reason. Their mathematics and climatological models demonstrated that the end of the human species is near and that we no longer have millenniums — or even centuries — left.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“One million more Latin Americans will be murdered, our waters and green fields will be filled with blood and the dream of democracy will die, both in my America and in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great Athens of the European West. If we hide the truth, we will see the forest and our democracies die. The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed. Deadly drug use has increased, progressing from soft drugs to harder drugs. Genocide has been perpetrated on my continent, and in my country millions of people have been sent to prison — and they have blamed the forest and its plants in order to hide their own social guilt. They have filled their speeches and their policies with nonsense. On behalf of my wounded Latin America, I call for an end to the irrational war on drugs.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“Those to blame are the societies trained to engage in endless consumption and into stupidly mistaking consumption for happiness, while filling the pockets of the powerful with money. The forest is not to blame for drug addiction — it is the irrational behaviour of the world Powers. Give them a dose of light, of reason. Turn the century’s lights back on. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years. If we do not change course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, a drug that Latin America does not produce. It will see millions of African-Americans incarcerated in private prisons. African-American prisoners will become a business venture for prison companies.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“According to the irrational world Powers, it is not the market that is to blame for shortening humankind’s existence, but the forest and those who live in it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the savings of the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent in centuries. The sadness of existence created by that artificial call for competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and possessions has another side to it — addiction to drugs in people who lose the contest, in the artificial race into which they have transformed humankind. The disease of loneliness will not be cured by spreading glyphosate in the forest. It is not the forest that is to blame.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“Meanwhile, they have declared that coal and oil must be protected, with the result that their use could lead to humankind’s extinction. That is the state of world power, of injustice and of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the forest’s exuberance and vitality a lustfulness and sinfulness — the root cause of the sadness in their societies, which are steeped in the insatiable compulsion to have and to consume. How can they hide the loneliness in people’s hearts, the emptiness of societies devoid of affection and competitive to the point of trapping people’s souls in loneliness, if not by blaming the plant, the people who grow it and the liberal secrets of the jungle?”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“For the members of the General Assembly, we provide an excuse for the emptiness and loneliness of their own societies, which leads them to live in a drug bubble. We hide them from their problems, which they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the forests, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forest burn, while hypocrites pursue the plants with poison in order to hide the disasters of their own societies, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil in order to satisfy their other addiction — to consumption, to power, to money. Which is more toxic to humankind — cocaine, coal or oil? The judgement of power has decreed that cocaine is a poison and must be persecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose — more deaths are caused by contamination of the drug during its illicit trade.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“The forest is burning, while the members of the General Assembly make war and play with it. The forest — the pillar of our global climate — is disappearing with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs planetary C02 is evaporating. This life-saving forest is seen in my country as an enemy to be defeated, a weed to be eradicated. The space where peasants live and grow coca because they have nothing else to grow is being demonized. The members of the General Assembly are interested in my country only if they can throw poison into its forests, put its men into prison and exile its women. They have no interest in our children’s education, they want to destroy our forest and extract coal and oil from its bowels. Our poison-absorbing sponge is of no use, they prefer to spread more poison into the atmosphere.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“One million Latin Americans have been killed, and 2 million African- Americans are imprisoned in North America for destroying or possessing the coca leaf. “Destroy the plant that kills”, they shout from the North, but the plant is only one of the millions that perish when they set the jungle on fire. Destroying the forest, the Amazon, has become the watchword of States and businesses. Never mind the scientists’ warning that the rainforest is one of the great pillars of the climate. For the global power networks, the forest and its inhabitants are to blame for the problems that beset them. The global power networks are at the mercy of their addiction to money, remaining in power, oil, cocaine and the hardest drugs available to numb themselves more. There is nothing is more hypocritical than the debate about saving the forest.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon forest, the Choco Forest, the waters, the Andes Mountain range and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is generated and atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) is absorbed. One of those C02-absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on Earth. Its destruction is being sought at any cost — it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas. As if at a paradoxical crossroads, the forest we are trying to save is at the same time being destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they throw vast quantities of poisons and glyphosate into the water, they arrest the growers and imprison them. People who grow the coca plant are arrested and imprisoned.”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)
“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth. There is an explosion of life there — thousands of multicoloured species in the seas, skies and lands. I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. Water cascades down the lush green mountains and valleys — but so do torrents of blood. I come from a country of blood-soaked beauty. My country is both beautiful and violent. How can beauty co-exist with death? How can the biodiversity of life flourish alongside the dance of death and horror? Who is to blame for breaking the spell with terror? Who or what is responsible for burying our daily lives in routine decisions about wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and a people?”
2022-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 77 (2022)