NO
Speech delivered by Colombian President Gustavo Petro at The Hague Group Emergency Conference in Bogotá in July
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, recalls the history that has brought revolutionary movements together and calls on the unity of all peoples of peace. Here is his full speech given at The Hague Group Emergency Conference in Bogotá:
Greetings to the ambassadors of the diplomatic corps, heads of missions accredited in Colombia and other countries. Minister of Foreign Affairs Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, “Mapi,” who was also a migrant in Spain and became a socialist leader in Madrid; Secretary General of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Zane Dangor; Minister of State of Palestine, Rayat Mansur; Executive Secretary of the Hague Group, Varsha Gandikota; United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in national and international territories in general, to all those present here.
We were born on April 19. On April 19, the people of Gran Colombia cried out for freedom. In Venezuela, on April 19, I believe—I hope I am not mistaken—there was a Palestinian uprising just as the occupation was beginning. On April 19, we stood up in rebellion, and I believe there are other April 19ths in history. That perhaps unites us as peoples who, in different parts of the world, have risen up in rebellion because we want to be democratic and free
And there is more and more slavery in the world. Increasingly, those who raised the banner of freedom and democracy have become slave owners. New forms of slavery, said Pope Francis, my friend, who was also a rebel because he felt what was happening spiritually in humanity as a whole. We are heading toward barbarism, but we can also head toward freedom. Everything, as the dialectical philosophers of ancient China said, I have just discovered in the Guambianos of Cauca, when Barbara was appointed a member of the Colombian Academy of Language—which is no small feat—and I read her recently delivered speech, expressing in perfect Spanish the philosophy of the Misak and ancestral indigenous people.
That philosophy is nothing more than dialectics constructed without knowing Hegel, without knowing Lao-Tzu, without even knowing Heraclitus, who came before them. It is a philosophy that has been my companion in decision-making: everything moves under the principle of contradiction. Therefore, every positive has its negative. An area of light can become dark; everything can become its opposite. And if not, neither history nor the universe would move, because the principle is universal, it seems. In the universe that we see—which comes from the past—everything, including the moon, because light travels in space, we see light and darkness. And it always corresponds to us: every time we see further, part of the darkness becomes light, we manage to detect it. It is light emitted long ago, thousands of light years ago.
But sometimes lights disappear because enormous worlds have died. We do not know if they become light again. Some physicists say they do. But here we are, at an infinitesimal point in the universe, and apparently the only ones with life, or at least intelligent life. How many thousands of light years can we see around us and find no life? Apparently, none. And apparently, we can only speak under Diogenes’ lantern. Everything else is belief. And Diogenes’ lantern has not yet shown us life in the universe. We are alone, we are unique.
And it seems that there is an intelligence in the universe that is energy, because even darkness has energy. All energies are sidereal, but there is one that is special: the one that inhabits this planet in mammals, a species that evolved among them, human beings, the only ones with the immense responsibility in the entire universe of intelligence, of thinking. We are thinking animals, and that thinking is constantly developing. Its fundamental gland is the brain. Every time a baby is born, the jewel of the universe is born: its brain and heart in a package we call a human being.
And if the human brain, which perhaps once acted alone—I believe it never did—in order to survive on the planet in the cold (an experience that has just been discovered in Bogotá), in order to live, it had to help itself. Helping each other is the secret that allowed us to survive and, sometimes for the worse, to dominate planet Earth, the only place where life exists. It seems that helping each other is our secret. But that help has two great organs in our bodies. It is help that comes from the heart, from feelings—to be more precise—because we are sensitive. Mammals help each other, and apparently other animals do too. Those that survive help each other.
Bees, which live in hives, feed by helping each other suck honey and find it; sometimes they die doing so. We could call the bee’s attraction to honey a survival instinct, but in mammals it is called love. What we feel when we help each other is love, and without it we cannot live. Neoliberals, in the final phase of big capital that is collapsing, and the feelings of barbarism are currently nothing more than the expression of a capitalism than exists only on paper.
We were talking about this when I argued with Macron in Seville: GDP measured in dollars—money, GDP, which is not all production—is 110 trillion a year, and public debt is 230 trillion a year. It is going to collapse. I don’t know when, but it’s going to collapse; it’s already collapsing. Capitalism is no longer a world of paper, but it has the dark virtue of leading us to barbarism in its own collapse. Barbarisms, many, but I have always spoken of two: that of the climate crisis and that of artificial intelligence. As Hawking said, not because it is bad to have intelligence that is no longer properly alive—and which we are producing in the universe—but because it must remain under the control of living intelligence.
And it does not belong to a country, it does not belong to some crazy mega-rich capitalist, but rather it has to be under humanity, under the living intelligence of humanity. Otherwise, humanity will come to an end. The world could become very productive, but there will be slaves again; the slaves will rebel. And Gaza is simply an experiment by the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how you respond to a rebellion of humanity. They plan to bomb all of us in the South, but they will end up like Guernica, bombing themselves with foreign weapons.
And that barbaric outlook obviously kills multilateralism, which is what brings nations together. It kills the idea of global democracy; it kills all international institutions. I have requested a meeting between CELAC and the US government, and there has been no written response because they do not want to meet with Latin America and the Caribbean. They know that by meeting with each of us separately, they are stronger, so they refuse to engage in dialogue and instead threaten us, as they are already doing. Some are afraid of the threat; others have become so accustomed to it that we are no longer afraid.
And this has been the story of our peoples: stories of rebellion and barbarism, and we are now experiencing the possibility of barbarism. But also, dialectically, the possibility of a different humanity, one that can love and think collectively. And we survive because the other form of help, besides the heart, is thinking. And Newton’s parable and Robinson Crusoe’s parable are lies. Illusions, fetishes like so many that we live with. We live among ghosts because capitalism is a ghost, and sometimes we believe the story of ghosts, fetishes.
Newton would not have been able to discover his formula for gravity without the Arabs, without algebra, without the Romans, without the Greeks, without the Egyptians, without other peoples who already had—as we know in America—a deeper understanding of mathematics; they already calculated the stars better than the Greek mathematicians themselves. Here in America there are wonderful things that they want to hide from us. The Americas, because now the concept of America has been reduced to a piece of the American continent.
People have lived in the Americas for 30,000 years and made art in Brazil 20,000 years ago—as far as we have been able to date—near Bogotá, in the Amazon rainforest. It is called Chiribiquete, and I want to open it up to the world. There is already a beautiful documentary about it, magical, set among the jungles and colorful birds: enormous murals unlike anything else found anywhere else, created by artists who, for generations, left their marks, their drawings, their ideas of home, their hands as people who will remain forever in humanity, in its history. Our ancestors are 20,000 years old, and perhaps even older.
And yesterday or the day before, amid the mockery of pseudo-economists from the north—that is what we call people who are not from the Caribbean, but that is also a fetish—here, near this place, 6,000 years ago, there was a people whose origins are unknown. Their genes are not found in the peoples who have survived through us, and they all died. They had no descendants. Their women must have died somehow, perhaps first. Why did this group disappear from this land of so much water? They did not help themselves; their own loneliness killed them.
A lack of water. Today Bogotá has been left—not today, but a few weeks ago—without water, a city of 9 million inhabitants, because they burned down the Amazon rainforest. And it turns out that the water came here from the trees of the Amazon rainforest, reaching great heights, and the vegetation there turned the water vapor in the clouds back into liquid water. And now we’ve run out. Climate crisis: the second event that could physically wipe out humanity, and we all know it. A climate crisis that is growing.
Look at the paradox, the dialectic: perhaps the most oil-rich region in the United States, where Ecopetrol has a fracking well that our oil company should not have, and it scares them that I say they should sell it because Colombia cannot be friends with death; it is friends with life. We are here in the country of beauty, the vital center of the world. Gran Colombia is the place where animals, instinctively nomadic, come more than anywhere else in the world. There is a reason for that.
And they discovered that when they cut Panama off and built the canal. As for Panama, we were all one people, with Venezuela we were one people, and we are one people with Colombia, and Ecuador too, perhaps even more so. And if you trace the border of the old Gran Colombia, which reached the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua, today it is most of the Caribbean, even the Dominican Republic wanted to use the tricolor flag—yellow, blue, and red—and its neighbor Haiti had the first revolution of the Americas.
But with all due respect to my friends in Haiti, the first free territory in America was founded by a black man from Africa, Prince Benkos Biohó. And there isn’t even a monument. Yes, they built a monument to the conqueror of the Alcázar in Cali, and here to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who was a genocidal maniac. Dialectic: free peoples build monuments to slave owners. Maybe so, maybe they will survive in history so that we know what history was like, but we should not build monuments to slave owners; we should build monuments to those who emancipated us.
And the first emancipator in America that we can remember: our indigenous people fought from the beginning. He arrived there and founded the first European city, he believed, in all of America, near Santa Marta, in Cartagena. Dialectic: the first slave stood up, broke the chains of all those who were there, and they left. They left to live another way of thinking: rebellions. And it is called San Basilio de Palenque. And this government made it a municipality because they did not want to see it as a municipality. Here they hate the elites who ruled Colombia, who are descendants of the slave owners, the emancipators. But we must remember this.
Sometimes I say: “What a shame for the Aryan Americans. Why don’t they bring the Statue of Liberty from New York and put it in front of Cartagena?” Cartagena fought for a year and its people almost died of hunger for freedom, being one of the cities of slavery in America along with Havana and Veracruz, Mexico. And today, Havana, Veracruz, Mexico, and Cartagena are governed by the same people in democracy and with the idea that Diogenes’ lantern will progressively illuminate the future of all humanity.
Well, I tend to ramble on because it’s a habit of mine, but I want to recall history for the sake of the present, because history has brought us together. So, in Haiti, the first revolution with the banner of equality, fraternity, and solidarity—liberty, equality, and solidarity. My friend here knows French better than I do. The very same arrived. But those who raised that banner were also slave owners in America. Dialectics. Washington was a slave owner, they say. And Bolívar too.
I just saw the room, which was not a cell, because Bolívar had a different conception of his slave Palacios, whom he never freed. And those who fought for the independence of this country and others were slave owners, and the contradiction exploded. You cannot be free and shout for freedom and fight if you yourself are a slave owner. It is possible. And here I remind you: this house, which belongs to the Marquis of San Carlos, has its own history. It was the home of the republican presidents of Colombia, many oligarchs—as we call them—slave owners until 1851, after Bolívar and Santander had died. I don’t remember who decided to leave; something scared them in this beautiful house, to a horrible palace where I sometimes live. But they want to imitate France, but imitations have no soul.
And down here you can see—I don’t know if you’ve seen it—the smallest room I’ve seen here, simple and unadorned: the room of the president of the Republic of Colombia, the first one we had, the liberator Simón Bolívar—who is not a liberator, he is an emancipator—the son of Castilians, but he learned to dance with the black men and women on his estate. And apparently he also had some of their blood, they say, because he was a very good dancer, and all these corridors were filled with dancing. And if he could dance like all Colombians, with blood from Africa and the Arabs. The Castilians don’t know how to dance, but the Flamencos do. And we came from Seville and Granada.
I just visited the Alhambra, which I had never seen before. I was eager to see the fusion of two cultures, a fascinating combination: one of the greatest monuments of the Arab and Castilian worlds. There, among the flower petals thrown by Arab women—the sultan’s wives, perhaps, or others—who were never allowed to leave the second floor, they played with the petals that fell into the water in the gardens where they talked. These Arabs were defeated militarily, but they had been there for seven centuries, meaning that their blood had mixed with that of all the inhabitants of Spain.
The sailors arrived—not the captains—on ships, first to Santa Marta, then to the Colombian Caribbean, and then they continued on. And that is why we Colombian Caribbean people have Arab blood. And then Vasconcelos, the Mexican, said: “We have all the blood of the world in our veins.” Arab blood, sub-Saharan blood, Latin blood, ancestral blood from 30,000 years ago. And they dare to tell us that we cannot walk through America. They dare to tell us that there is a prison waiting for us called Alcatraz in Florida, which used to be a state of Mexico.
And so even Mexicans themselves cannot walk around Florida because they will be thrown in jail in chains. And I had to stop a plane and send it back; Trump got really angry. I thought I was doing the right thing because they were bringing Colombians in chains. How can that be? The descendants of people who arrived 20,000 years ago are being expelled by people who arrived just 500 years ago or less, and so we have no rights.
So, Bolívar did not say that this was how freedom should be achieved, and he did not say this to the founding fathers of the United States. And the founding fathers of the United States, even though they were slave owners, did not raise the flag of freedom, even before the French and before us, but at the same time, look at the contradiction with Haiti: liberators alongside slave owners and slaves raising the flags of the liberators. Half of the Colombian flag is the flag of Haiti, and it was made by black slaves, black women recently freed from slavery. The Colombian flag comes from Haiti, like the flag of present-day Venezuela, like the flag of Ecuador: it is all yellow, blue, and red. And the blue and red do not represent a Russian tsarina with whom Miranda had fallen in love. Miranda fell in love with the Caribbean and the Americas, and that is why he took up the flag given to him by Haiti and its dark-skinned generals. And he took up their weapons and their ships and the flag they gave us, because they made it for the first time.
And the Caribbean Sea was crossed for the first time by revolutionary men, by women who had made the flag that was known throughout the world as liberty. And here he triumphed, and here he lived, and here he was betrayed in this very house where they were going to kill him: Santander, the vice president. History repeats itself. And so he jumped out of a window—there used to be a river there; the Spanish always cover up rivers, I don’t know why they call them “ramblas”—but that one was still there and now it’s gone. And his love, perhaps he wasn’t in love with her, we don’t know—because he fell in love with a Spanish princess and loved her all his life, a woman from Madrid, by the way, who died here because she couldn’t stand the climate, the mosquitoes—and he was saved by her. Love saved Bolívar that time.
But he decided once again to go alone, and those who are alone die like old lions. Old lions always leave when the young lions become stronger and take their females and kill their cubs. And he knows he has to go, and he dies of hunger when his claws are worn down. When we are alone, we die. Only when we are together can we help each other.
Well, Caribbean peoples here present: the Caribbean is not a sea of pirates, we have proven it. The Caribbean is a sea of revolutionaries. This is history that does not appear in the movies. We drove out the pirates and the slave traders, and the Caribbean must remain a free sea and a free land. When slaves were brought from Africa by force, they threw themselves into the sea and founded a series of nations with the help of the indigenous people of that time, who are called Garífunas. And most of the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean, whose inhabitants are called Raizales, have dark skin and beautiful music; they were never slaves. They have a different conception of life.
We are also Caribbean and we have an island there called San Andrés, made up of free towns. Because they were free, they joined Colombia because they saw Colombia as the land of freedom, the freedom that Haiti promised them and did not deliver until decades later: freedom for all slaves in the Americas. Freedom for all slaves in the Americas, which we still have because new forms of slavery were created. The immigrants want to enslave them.
And to the peoples of the Caribbean, I say: our alliance is with the progressive peoples of the American continent. We have been winning together. Laura Gil, who is here today, a Uruguayan-Colombian, is an expression of that alliance. They did not defeat us. But now the inter-American human rights system, which was our beacon—I am here as president thanks to it—has fallen into other hands and was broken by the progressive governments on the continent, which are still in the majority, and in the Caribbean, which was conquered once again by the United States. The inter-American system has been lost. This cannot be.
Money is not more important than food and nourishment, than the solar panel that is above oil, and especially than the idea of freedom that we all embody as Caribbean people, and we must unite. And on the continent, the Caribbean is called Gran Colombia in the south, which must be rebuilt. If America is integrated, it is because Gran Colombia was united; and if Gran Colombia is divided, Latin America will never be able to integrate because it has centrifugal forces, and dialectics operate.
Well, Haiti must be helped as it helped us, and beyond that, as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the universal Argentine, perhaps the most universal of Argentines, taught us: “Wherever there is injustice, we must fight against it anywhere in the world.” Bolívar had already tried this: anywhere in the world where there is injustice, because otherwise we are not human beings. And that message from Che remains engraved in all of us. Only anti-human beings say that Che was a murderer. They cannot understand that it is right to rebel against injustice because they are the unjust ones.
Injustice and the right to rebellion when there is tyranny. And today the world is ruled by tyranny. Today the world is ruled by tyranny, not democracy. Those who were democrats became slave owners. Once again, we see the paradox of France in Haiti, whose Napoleonic army—the largest they had—was destroyed on Haitian soil. Our battles against the Spanish were nothing compared to the battle of the former slaves brought from Africa by force against the Napoleonic army. They defeated them. That is why Macron was angry that a man from the South came to teach him that you cannot stand with injustice from Paris, or else you contradict the French Revolution as it was contradicted in Haiti.
I love France because, ultimately, Colombian leftists considered ourselves French and learned French. There is a terrible saying there. And revolutions took place there. The thing is, they don’t happen anymore. I hope there will be one. Now the beacon is here in Latin America, and we are not French. We are the largest in all of Latin America, the largest descendant of the living Roman Empire. And we have the good and the bad, because here there is vendetta, as Bolívar experienced down there, here on the first floor. Vendetta and love. It is an immense contradiction that Italians also suffer today, but we are the same.
And I will not get into that topic any further because I could get into trouble, but we are the legacy of the Roman Empire, and we are also the descendants of the great Latin American cultures, which we could not call “Latin American” because they were not Latin, just as Africa was not Latin. We are not Latin Americans either. We are the diversity of the world. Anyone who lives in Bogotá or any other region can find a man or woman who looks just like someone from anywhere else in the world. There are even Vikings here. And that is how we are: we can understand humanity and our richness.
There was a genocide. From 1948 to date, 700,000 people have been murdered in Colombia for political reasons and for reasons of greed, and sometimes for reasons of love, because we also die from love, always alone. And those are the 100 years of solitude. 100 years of solitude are the 100 years of a people killing themselves, as has happened to us. And the only way not to kill ourselves and to find peace and beauty—because here there is plenty of it, as in almost no other place in the world—is to leave solitude behind as a people. And we have been alone. 700,000 dead, 10 Gazas in our history: through genocide, mass graves, the bombing of our dead children, the bombing of our peasant people as in Guernica.
A president descendant of slave owners came up with the idea that, in order to wipe out the communists and prevent a Cuban revolution, the peasant cooperatives had to be bombed, and he repeated Guernica. And Colombia didn’t realize it, didn’t even know what Guernica was. But part of Colombia did, and the people took to the mountains and almost ended the oligarchic state. There was a huge uprising here, but the chicha ended the dream. Alcohol sank the possibility of revolution. Fidel Castro was here, very young, and they blamed him. And here, by coincidence, he met Gabriel García Márquez, who was trying to save a typewriter from a bonfire.
And we learned that those who burn books also burn human beings. And those who applaud death as descendants of Latinos end up killing human beings. And today we are under the illusion of ending loneliness. And that is why we want to unite with humanity and with all of Latin America, misnamed as it is, and talk to Trump—which has not happened—because we even talk to the gringos, because they will be here for thousands of years and so will we. And we will have to understand each other as humans, talking and using words, not bombs, to also find peace in the Americas, which may also be the salvation of the world.
South America has such enormous potential for clean energy that it could decarbonize the entire fossil fuel energy matrix of the United States, and we’re not even talking about that. And that would largely solve the climate crisis and, therefore, the possibility of the extinction of life. And we’re not even talking about that; over there, they don’t believe in the climate crisis. And Texas is flooded, and New York has been flooded. Hey, the capital of capitalism, where in its very center, Brooklyn and Wall Street, you can smell marijuana on every street, when here they killed a million Latin Americans just for exporting cannabis. We are the dead, and now they are enjoying themselves. I don’t know how because I don’t know how to smoke.
So, what is this paradox? What is it? They want to keep killing us. We are living beings and we have to speak out. And now I will move on to Gaza and finish, because the story is endless. And so are the words. We have lived Gaza in our blood. They invaded us too, 70 years ago. There cannot be a single Colombian out there—but there are—who is surprised that peoples who have been occupied by tyrannies rebel. And so, we can never—yes, we can criticize many things, but not the Palestinian people. They have the right to rebel because their lands were occupied.
Our Colombian lands were occupied twice: once by the Spanish long ago; some of our islands by the English and the French; and Panama was also occupied by the Americans, who took much of our territory. Thankfully, we did not disappear. And you cannot do that. A people who are occupied deserve to rebel. Rebellion is not a crime; it is a political crime for the tyrant. And when the tyrant falls, the political criminal who was called a terrorist now governs and is no longer a criminal. No one, neither those at the bottom nor those at the top in a rebellion, nor their flag.
Here, they also wanted to censor a flag that is not actually Colombia’s flag, but Bolívar’s, which is red and black. Bolívar designed it during his “war to the death” against Spain, which, thankfully, ended with a dialogue between Bolívar and a Spanish general, Murillo, in a house. They continued at war; the war did not end, but it was humanized. And that is why there have been Spaniards living here with us ever since, because they deserve to live. And they understood this because they did not want to return to desert Spain, but to this lush Colombia that they already considered their homeland. And we gave and opened up, and the war to the death ended.
But the flag meant “freedom or death.” And I don’t know if he copied it; I don’t know where it came from, because the Europeans, including the Spanish, because Bolívar galloped across the Caribbean Sea and continued along the Atlantic and entered Spain on horseback. And in the 20th century, Spain wanted to be a republic like Colombia. Bolívar was alive then, and they raised red and black flags. And the red and black flag flies everywhere. Today: freedom or death. And since we don’t want to talk about death, we say “freedom or freedom,” and then it stops being red and black and becomes red. We say here that it is multicolored because we are free and alive, and the color of life is all the colors of the world.
Europe experienced an epic journey after defeating Hitler, and today they are electing Hitler’s children. Today they repeat Hitler’s words: “We are superior,” they say if they are white, and anyone with a different skin color is excluded. Hitler. They are not yet being killed, but that is Hitler. And how is it possible that the partisan peoples of Italy, of the Resistance, who do not know what it means, and of the Garibaldi Brigade, and the peoples of the French Resistance—Christians, communists, socialists—and those who survived Republican Spain, the first to enter liberated Paris, were anarchists with the red and black flag of Spain, of the Spanish anarchy that had been defeated and now triumphed against its enemy, the enemies of freedom, the blacks—not because of their skin, but because of their hearts—are the dark flag of death. Where is Europe today?
And then a series of tasks and questions arise that we have to address. The largest grave in the world is not in America; it is in the Mediterranean, next to where democracy was created, or at least the word, according to some: Athens, filled with the corpses of migrants trying to reach Europe. There is migration because they themselves impoverished the world with their colonies. They are the impoverishers, and therefore they are the killers of humanity.
And the way out of this situation, to stop being those people and raise the flags of freedom once again, is to speak up. Progress must reach the south. Africa can also decarbonize Europe’s energy matrix. And the Chinese are making an immense effort. I watch them from here, but I decided to put Colombia on the Silk Road because they didn’t insult us or threaten us there. I hope it works out.
And so now we belong to the universe, to the first world. We are no longer so alone. We can now escape violence. The Mediterranean, where Palestine is located, because the Mediterranean is plural, where Jesus was born, who was Palestinian. The place where he was born is also under threat, and that is Palestine. And we don’t understand it. The message we read from Jesus—other peoples not so much—is that there is no longer a chosen people in Palestine, nor are the Jewish people, who were a religion, not an ethnic group, because they were Palestinians born in Palestine, nor are the white Christian lords of the United States; they are not the chosen people.
From the voice of Jesus, when he drove the merchants out of the temple, he decided—perhaps he thought it, he didn’t decide it—that God’s chosen people are humanity. They are the only ones with brains thinking about what we have discovered about the universe. That is why we are all the chosen people. And the chosen people do not kill each other; they must be free. The day when every human being on the planet is free, there will be no wars. We think of the stars. “Ad astra,” said the Romans. We also say “ad astra” here, and humanity spreads throughout the universe bringing life, and the inert universe will become a vital universe thinking with free brains, helping each other.
It will be our destiny if we defeat today’s barbarism. And today’s barbarism will be defeated if Palestine is free. We met Palestinian guerrillas from the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Bolivarian April 19 Movement, and we trained together and learned things together, and it was in the Matruh desert in Libya where Gaddafi lived. And there arrived the forces of SWAPO—I think that was its name—from Namibia; its delegates are here today. And there were, I think—I don’t remember well—people from the African National Congress, and people from the Polisario Front who spoke Spanish, Arabs, because they are another conquered people, and there were Greeks. And then a group of young men and women—because none of them were old—came together from Latin America, Panama, Africa, and the Middle East to train us for war.
In the end, we all ended up making dialectical peace: Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, the M19 in Colombia, and almost all of the Latin American guerrilla groups. Those of us who came together to prepare for war ended up preparing for world peace. And the Palestinians were there with us, young people; I don’t know where they are now. No one has written that book. I have asked the people of the M19 who are still alive to write it because it is part of world history, because it demonstrates several things: that a progressive woman and man are universal, not parochial. They come together with the world; ideas for fighting tyranny intersect.
Two of my friends died there, both very dear to me: Iván Marino Ospina, who was torn to pieces near Bogotá after being tortured, and who was a poet. I am trying to recover his poetry and songs. I put them on the internet in the hope that someone will pick them up and put them on modern technologies. And Francisco “Pacho” Vargas used to say “Paquidérmido.” Many died, but there are still some alive. Why isn’t that book being written, a book of global solidarity from the perspective of rebellion?
And today, a member of the M19 is president, and we are the children and officers—we told ourselves—of Bolívar. “Officers of Bolívar, step forward.” Our slogan was: “Victory or death.” Now it is not death; it is victory. As Bolívar once said: “We must win here.” We must win. And so, it falls to us to make tough decisions in the face of barbarism.
I was betrayed here in this palace. History repeats itself. Because I said that not a single ton of coal would be sent to kill Palestinian babies. And here in this house, under my government, white officials, descendants of slave owners—I say it—took up the idea of how to return. The president’s innocuous phrase in a decree. It wasn’t Glencore, it wasn’t Drummond; they took advantage, yes. But those who committed the betrayal were here, paid by the Colombian people and in other ministries. And then they set the trap in a very Colombian way, very much like Santander, just like when Santander went to kill Bolívar on the second floor of this house. Just like the betrayal that has accompanied us ever since, killing us among ourselves. Perhaps the loneliness began on that day when Santander was going to kill Bolívar and was saved by Manuela Sáenz, who has a Basque name but was perhaps the first female guerrilla fighter in Colombia, along with some indigenous women.
Some even made a Spaniard fall in love, because all forms of struggle are possible. So those women saved us, and hopefully they will save us now because we are on the verge of extinction. On the front line: women in the struggle for life. Hopefully, hopefully they will ride out on horseback like Manuelita. They say she was a good rider. The colonel joined the army like many women, the Turkish women and others, who go to war with their loved ones and risk their lives. And Manuelita did it, and other colonels, generals. It is time for women because it is women who care for life. Front line, ride again for love and life.
It’s time. Let’s join forces with Europe at the CELAC meeting. It’s scheduled to take place in Santa Marta, the first land to be conquered and also the land of freedom. What do we tell the Europeans? They bring us Zelensky. I believe that a war between brothers must not continue. They are Slavic people and have the same history, and they are killing each other, and then they are made to kill each other to win. It is greed to return to Ukraine, a land of slave laborers and a land from which those minerals are taken elsewhere.
What do we say to Europe? What do we say to NATO? The two military blocs that were formed for other reasons in history—the Warsaw Pact, which NATO now wants, and the NATO pact. Many of its countries; we are half members, they never even welcomed us here when we begged to join; then they call us a partner, I don’t know what kind of strategic one. What are we doing in NATO? If the main leaders of NATO are involved in genocide, what are we doing there?
Now is not the time to reconfigure the world militarily. There is no Latin American army. There cannot be an army to save humanity and enforce ideas, because we learned from the M19: this is political-military. Hegel said it: first come the ideas, then the cannons; otherwise, ideas are food for mice. We do not write books for no one to read; we write them, yes, and beautifully, but it is to make them a reality. He who believes, creates; they say: we have turned fantasy into reality.
Here we have an Aureliano ruling Colombia, and here we have set yellow butterflies flying, and here we are the heart of the planet’s biodiversity. And here we have a history older than Europe and the United States. We are building reality. Here we left loneliness behind and now we talk to the world. Here, those who used to cut off the heads of kings now embrace and kiss us. There is another reality unfolding that we have created in our dreams. The Caribbean created dreams that became reality. The Caribbean invites you to dream, but also to make your dreams come true.
What are we doing in NATO? Now is not the time for another military alliance. How can we stand with armies that drop bombs on children? Those armies are not armies of freedom; they are armies of darkness. We must have armies of light, bring our armies together, and think things through carefully. Israeli weapons can no longer arrive here, and yet they are arriving, and the defense minister of this government must answer for that. And here in this house, the Foreign Ministry and other ministries, even officials who called themselves communists, helped set a trap for the president with a two-word phrase that I can’t remember now, which made it innocuous to ban coal exports. And Glencore and Drummond are taking 60% of the coal that Israel needs.
Because we are the fifth largest exporter of coal in the world, and the country of life is helping to kill humanity. I don’t want to export coal or explore for gas. I have made up my mind, and the last oil reserves will be depleted because that kills Colombia and kills humanity. Exactly. So, we banned coal exports, and the government itself is cheating us. And the foreign minister has been ordered to change the decree immediately: banned. They are taking us to court before judges who do not understand my words or the new reality of the world, and they are overturning the president’s decrees. I am facing a cracked labyrinth. Do you know what that is? And there are many of them.
The most persecuted person in Colombia is the president of the Republic of Colombia. I sometimes say that I myself am a slave. I went to Manta to write my book there in front of a pink bougainvillea next to a beautiful sea, and they said that I was with the biggest criminal in Ecuador, and they almost destroyed me in the press, which tells lies because it is owned by big business.
We must leave NATO; there is no other way. And our relationship with Europe can no longer be with peoples who help—not peoples, because the European peoples do not help—with European governments that betray their own people and are helping to drop bombs. And Colombian coal does not become bombs in Israel to kill children. If the tariffs are not lifted, whatever it takes, other peoples will help us and buy our products. Colombia buys Palestinian olive oil, not Israeli. The Palestinians produce it; the Israelis put their brand on it, right? Colombia buys from Palestine and does not sell to Israel.
Not because I hate Israel. I support the two-state solution. I believe that the world has allowed Jews to live there for thousands of years, and people of Arab descent—because they also have ancestors who were written about in the Bible. Then they call us anti-Semites, a religious term. And when I read about where Shem was, it says that he was a descendant of both people who were called Arabs and people who were called Jews, and they were the same people. Jews and Arabs in Palestine are the same people and have the same origin. They don’t have to kill each other because they will only find the loneliness that Jesus found when the Romans—who weren’t from there—killed him.
Well, we have to leave NATO; we have to set up an army of light with all the peoples of the world who want to join. And we have to tell Europe that if it wants to be with Latin America or Africa, it has to stop helping the Nazis. And we have to tell the American people of all colors—because they are now of all colors—to stop helping the Nazis.
There was a coalition of an army of light: some were red and raised the red flag and arrived in Berlin before anyone else, and Hitler committed suicide there. Others used the flag with stars and red stripes and also almost reached Berlin. Others were the peoples of Europe fighting in the mountains in the cold against Hitler. Others were the Chinese, who were fighting just as hard against Hitler and his allies and liberating their country. Other peoples did the same. We formed a great global coalition of humanity, and Hitler died. His ideas live on in the armies of darkness.
And why aren’t we forming an army of light? Because in the end, if they don’t listen to us, if our call for dialogue doesn’t stop the bombs, if Guernica continues to be everywhere—and I know what these words cost me, because a judge, a former conservative judge from Cauca, and a former senator from Cauca have already been silenced; Cauca was a land of slavery, but now it is a land of freedom—that they weren’t going to extract, that we should ask the Mossad to extract the president of Colombia by force. Well, don’t even try. A woman saved Bolívar; maybe one will come forward. Hopefully. But we cannot remain silent.
An army to save the world so that ideas are not eaten by rats. And that army begins in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the world. We have to come together so that we are respected. Hopefully we will never have to use it. We laid down our arms. Arafat laid down his arms. Nelson Mandela laid down his arms. Many of us who were in the Libyan desert laid down our arms. We no longer use them. We use words. Magnificent examples of peace. Hopefully, but they have to respect us. Our voice is not that of clowns. Our voice is respected, and those who bomb and make bombs have to respect us, and that is political-military.
And it happened to us, and if it is only political, hopefully we will not use military force, but it happened to us. Then our ALA group has to go further too, further, because otherwise the genocide in the world will not stop and barbarism will prevail. And what I want is a humanity of free beings everywhere on the planet, and I think we all do. So, it’s our turn, and I end these words by shouting: Long live free Palestine!