Colombian President Petro Calls the Drug War a Genocide in Meeting with AMLO

“Socalj” for Borderland Beat

President Gustavo Petro, during his speech at the closing of the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs, that the 50 years of fighting against drugs has produced a genocide in the peoples of Latin America. He stated that these countries are victims and not the victimizers, as the US and Europe portray them to be.

“There is a purpose for Latin America to speak for itself and not repeat the official discourses of world power, on this specific issue, that we can, starting from, because we lived the experience, we are living it, 50 years in the case of Colombia, which is where it begins and that is now an American problem, in every sense of the word, in the Americas. But we have that experience of 50 years, a bloody and ferocious experience and it has begun to be repeated for a few decades in some countries, such as Mexico, so, perhaps the fact that Colombia and Mexico are the organizers of this meeting, has a meaning, a value on planet Earth, in humanity, because we are the biggest victims of this policy and I begin by underlining the word victims, not victimizers.”

Petro also warned that the countries’ producers are victims of the decisions of consumer countries, producing, in five decades of war, a genocide in the Latin American peoples:

“In the 50 years, they have pointed us out as victimizers, and there has been so much fear of world power, of our political leading layers, that then the only thing we have done is, in a shameful way, because we know what happens in our countries. We censor ourselves because we are afraid of being told that we are allied with drug trafficking.

“Of course, since most of the marijuana and cocaine are produced here, which during these 50 years marked the fundamental course in time of the so-called war on drugs, then we are afraid to say what you, who have the Most of the consumers of these drugs, in their societies, we are afraid to tell them that they are wrong and we repeat and repeat an official discourse. In our own societies, and that our silence in these 50 years has been complicit with genocide in our countries because that is what the official policy of war on drugs in our Latin America has caused a genocide.”

“The policy called the war on drugs has failed, it is of no use, if we continue it we will not add another million” of deaths in Latin America and we are going to have more failed states and we are going to have, perhaps, the death of democracy on our continent”

President Petro said that the ‘War on Drugs’ is focused on the supply and not the demand. It seeks to force the state to control supply and the market. When, the United States and Russia themselves have shown that states cannot control them, that in the case of Soviet socialism, the attempt to control or end the market by decree was a failure.

“If we are convinced that the State cannot end the market, how is it that here in this war on drugs policy it tells us that the State can end that market. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

“The societies with the most loneliness are the most drug users.” He said that this is not the case in Colombian or Mexican society, but that it occurs in societies such as those of Brussels or New York. “The experience of walking on a street in Bogotá or Cali or a street in the United States is totally different, it is not simply because of cultures, but because an economic system produced it that way.”

Then he said that capitalism, in its late phase, “led societies that consume drugs today to loneliness and that is why they consume them.”

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