Morales assails U.S. and blockade against Cuba
In a fiery speech at the United Nations on Wednesday (Sept. 24), President Evo Morales of Bolivia defended the natural environment and assailed the West for its capitalist system and imperialistic bent.
“The empire of finances, the empire of the markets, the empire of the arms industry must succumb and give way to the wisdom of life and life in harmony with peace,” he told the General Assembly in New York City.
The president said there will be no harmony in the world “if the arrogance of the empires and their renewed colonialism harass, imprison and murder human beings, the cultures and the peoples of the world.”
Mother Earth is dying as a result of the environmental, climatic, financial, alimentary and energy crises generated by “an inhumane and predatory capitalism that turns human life and Mother Earth into merchandise,” he said.
Morales, who is president of the G77+China, the largest group of U.N. countries, said that the 21st Century is the time to build a new world without capitalism.
“This is the century of peace, but peace with sovereignty, with freedom of the people, not with a free market,” he said. “It is the century for accords for freedom, for life and peace, not for accords of free trade in lives.”
“If we want to end with poverty, if we want to defend life and Mother Earth, we have no option but to end with the capitalist system and imperialist thinking,” the Bolivian leader said. He was particularly hard on the “exclusive structures” of organizations like the International Monetary Fund, which “should not be governed only by developed countries that oppress the developing countries.”
Morales asked the world’s nations “to eradicate financial colonialism” and end with “the geopolitical control of the great powers, which promote conflicts to assure a neocolonial power for themselves.”
He accused the United States of creating instability in the Middle East by attacking Iraq in 2003. Where the U.S. intervenes, “it leaves destruction and death, but also [creates] riches for the arms and oil industries,” he said.
Morales criticized “the United States’ imperial warmongering, which, faced with war, threatens with more war. Every year, we hear here Obama’s speeches about war,” he said, referring to President Obama’s latest speech about the war against the Islamic State.
He also denounced the U.S. blockade against Cuba, which he called “the system of sanctions most unfair, severe and prolonged that has ever been practiced against any country in the world.” That statement elicited loud applause from the General Assembly.
Also on Wednesday, Morales — an indigenous Aymar· — inaugurated the first U.N. World Conference of Indigenous People.
“The fundamental principles of the indigenous movement are life, Mother Earth, and peace, and these principles of the worldwide indigenous movement are permanently threatened by a system and model, the capitalist system, a model that extinguishes human life and the Mother Earth,” he stated.
Bolivia is the only country to have fully incorporated the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into its new Constitution, which was approved by popular referendum in 2009.
After the inaugural ceremony, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon praised President Morales as a “symbol of the developing world.”
