Full speech by the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, at the VIII Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). teleSUR
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00:00 This is a beautiful country that I didn't know.
00:12 So to all the presidents, prime ministers that are here right now, we need to talk about
00:21 peace and Colombia needs peace. In the effort of decades to end Colombian violence and bring
00:32 peace to the country, we have learned a lot of things. Many governments, many political
00:39 forces and we have gained moral. I was saying just days ago when we were pronouncing we
00:54 are going to end the war, we got a lot of people with a lot of power, political power.
01:07 Colombia lifted the word peace as a necessity for humanity. And I would like to say that
01:20 we are going to reaffirm ourselves as a zone of peace.
01:27 That Latin America and the Caribbean, that is also another world, the planet. Why is
01:38 this violence arising in the world? And I dare to say that it has to deal with the main
01:49 problem of humanity, the climate change, that is produced by the economic system, which
01:59 is capitalism. And to be left behind, it needs a new economy. We need to separate our world
02:15 from the world of oil. So we need a change in the relationships with all the regions
02:28 that are empowering the world. And of course, this brings tension to the politicians in
02:37 the world. And we have here two big tendencies. One that looks for to leave behind the exploitation
02:51 of oil, and another that still wants to exploit the resources of the world. So this one that
03:07 is trying to keep the resources that the world has, they show their military power. They
03:20 cannot be sustained if they do not respect the international law. So they push the bottom
03:35 of the bombs. They are showing us genocide in front of our eyes. This is not the old
03:43 dynamic of the Israeli conflict, which is proven. But also, Germany supports genocide.
03:53 France, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and above all, the United States, in their
04:02 democratic version, they support the Iran side, because they are making a demonstration
04:11 of their humanity. If we want to change the economy of the world, and they are saying,
04:22 look at our military power, what is happening in Palestine might happen in any of your countries
04:30 if you try to make those changes. And here it is, the first danger in Latin America and
04:39 the Caribbean that we have to recognize, and we must act.
04:46 In the biggest American escalation, we are the most violent region in the world. Even
04:56 more than in all those regions where war is right now. We have seen a genocide of a million
05:08 of Americans. And most of those people are Colombian, but every time they are Mexican,
05:18 they are American. So that violence has produced an exodus that has taken millions, that have
05:31 been moving a lot of people from the south to the north, to the border with the United
05:38 States, where jail, death awaits for them. And what produced that violence, that million
05:47 people in America, if we need to talk about peace, they so back call war against drugs.
06:04 So the United States believes that the war against drugs needs repression, jail, assassination,
06:16 and no prevention and public health to prevent those people to fall in the consume of those
06:24 substances that are very dangerous. The result couldn't be more dramatic and failed. So on
06:34 the other hand, the United States changed their consume of cocaine, marijuana, that
06:41 was killing them. So we have a big catastrophe. So because they couldn't prevent and believe
06:52 that jail is the remedy. So that brought to our countries a minute of death. So if we
07:04 want to follow this topic with autonomy, we are forced to change the way of thinking.
07:13 Peace is in our region. It's a political autonomy, a military of Latin America and the Caribbean.
07:27 And I'm referring in the last one, in the military, because it is very naive to think
07:34 that we are going to create a peace zone if we do not accommodate to the big blocs and
07:44 negotiations in the world. We are now before a perspective in the world of change of the
07:53 economic system like in the past. Now, right now, we are in front of a war, a political
08:04 power. This is not a work of autonomy. Peace, the wish of prevent violently. The situation
08:17 It's about us.