MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Petro tells world powers to change course as war on drugs has failed

Decreasing drug consumption does not require wars, it requires that we all build a better society: a more caring, more loving society,” Petro argued

Colombian President Gustavo Petro Tuesday said in his first appearance before the United Nations General Assembly that the war waged by wealthier countries against drug trafficking had failed, while the world's powers insisted on their quest to controlling the world's oil and coal reserves.

“The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed,” said Petro. “We serve them to excuse the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live amid drug bubbles. We hide from them the problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people,” he added.

“Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. Never mind the cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars. For the world's power relations, the forest and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them,” argued the first ever leftwing head of state of the planet's largest producer of cocaine.

“Power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine, and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the jungle,” added the former guerrilla fighter who has undertaken a path for “total peace” with belligerent groups still existing in Colombia.

“What is more poisonous for humanity? Cocaine, coal, or oil?,” wondered the South American leader. Cocaine was the answer. In Petro's view, coal and oil “must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all humanity” because “these are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational.”

Petro said the world should focus on the market and the wealth of those who have and want more instead of on the jungle, the coca leaf plant and those who grow it if the reasons for the planet's misfortunes are to be targeted. “The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Strike a blow of reason to your power. Turn on again the lights of the century!” Petro insisted. “By hiding the truth, you will see the jungle and democracies die,” he warned.

“I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. Decreasing drug consumption does not require wars, it requires that we all build a better society: a more caring, more loving society,” he underlined while insisting that the “beauty of his country” should not be touched by the “poisons” that kill the coca leaf because they contaminate amid a growing climate change problem.

“When actions were most needed, when speeches were no longer useful when it was essential to deposit money in funds to save humanity when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented one war and another and another. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas,” Petro stressed as he blamed the market and the wealth of those who have and want more for the ongoing wars and for not “acting against the climate crisis” but “deploying machine guns” instead to shoot the millions of starving people who arrive at their borders fleeing the global crisis. With these policies, “the mentality of those who politically created gas chambers and concentration camps” is being consolidated, Petro maintained. “Do they not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on their countries is to return to the water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients?”

According to Petro, the “climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people,” a disaster he linked to “capital” and its “logic” of consumption. “Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death,” he insisted while suggesting to “finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests” or reduce the foreign debt of emerging countries, like his own, in exchange for saving nature: “Just exchange debt for life, for nature.”

“It is time for peace,” Petro underlined.