The Colombian President Gustavo Petro has ruthlessly called out the US government and blasted its War on Drugs as exploitative and destructive of the environment.
The speech was made on the first day of the United Nations General Assembly in New York – Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August.
Calling the war on drugs a “war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people“, he says the North are only interested in Colombia “to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion.
He said:
“The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America.
“The war on drugs has failed.”
Coca plant
Talking about the Amazon-native coca plant in particular, the president said:
“To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them.
“For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America.
“Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle.”
End the war on drugs
Petro then calls on the rest of Latin America to put an end to the ward on drugs:
“I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs.
“To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs?
“Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.
“Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, to profit and money.
“I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose.
“It is time for PEACE.”
President Gustavo Petro has previously called for a new global strategy to regulate drug markets.
Read the full transcript here.
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