United Nations Headquarters
CNN
—
In his first deal with to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, just lately elected Colombian president Gustavo Petro delivered a fiery speech that recalled a few of his marketing campaign issues, slamming the warfare on medicine as a failure and accusing the worldwide north of turning a blind eye to the destruction of the Amazon.
Abandoning the cautious wording that characterizes such a lot international relations on the UN, Petro contrasted the hazards of drug habit to what he described as humanity’s much more harmful “addiction to irrational power, profit and money.”
“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he requested.
“The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted, while it only causes minimal deaths from overdoses … but instead, coal and oil must be protected, even when it can extinguish all humanity,” he stated.
Following UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s caution that “our planet burns,” Petro often known as the worldwide discourse round saving the surroundings “hypocritical,” pronouncing suggestions and warnings from scientists in regards to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest have lengthy been overlooked.
“The climate disaster that will kill hundreds of millions of people is not being caused by the planet, it is being caused by capital. By the logic of consuming more and more, producing more and more, and for some earning more and more,” he additionally stated.
Colombia is the sector’s greatest manufacturer of cocaine, and over the last 50 years public government have driven a prohibitionist schedule, banning the business and intake of gear with a view to hit the criminals that take advantage of drug trafficking of their wallet. So a long way on the other hand, the circulate of illicit components has no longer ceased.
In his speech, Petro, who was once inaugurated closing month, known as on all of Latin America to forestall the warfare on medicine.
“Reducing drug use does not require wars,” he stated. “It needs all of us to build a better society.”
Petro has stated previously that he needs Colombia to export meals fairly than cocaine and incentivize different sorts of manufacturing thru agricultural subsidies as an alternative of guns. His management additionally just lately introduced a invoice to legalize leisure marijuana within the nation, with Colombian Sen. Gustavo Bolivar – an in depth best friend to Petro – telling CNN in August that he believed law may in the future prolong to cocaine too.
His appeals on Tuesday for a regional strategy to to medicine didn’t fall on deaf ears. During a press briefing after the day’s speeches, Bolivian President Luis Arce stated on Tuesday that his management have been in dialogue with Petro across the issues of the speech.
“He shared the ideas with us that he spoke about today. We would like to hear a very specific proposal about this,” Arce stated.
Though noting that Bolivia and Colombia face very other eventualities on the subject of drug trafficking, Arce added that he did suppose Colombia, Peru and Bolivia – the 3 greatest manufacturers of cocaine on the earth – will have to align their “criteria” in preventing the problem.
Since Petro took place of job, the 3 international locations are all run by way of left-leaning leaders.
Bolivia already has a thriving felony marketplace of coca byproducts, most commonly dry leaves which can be chewed by way of the indigenous inhabitants and the governments of Bolivia and Colombia have prior to now driven for a regional re-thinking of drug insurance policies in multilateral conferences.
