“If we don’t debate today’s failed anti-drug policy with the United States, we have serious problems,” said the Colombian president.
The President, Gustavo Petro, reiterated this Wednesday in Davos (Switzerland) the need to “decriminalize and lead to the reduction of consumption through prevention” by insisting that if a balance is made of the 50 years of the global fight against drugs “it could be said that it is an absolute, total failure.”
The call was made by the Head of State, when speaking at the session ‘Leadership for Latin America’, held within the framework of the Davos World Economic Forum meeting, which was moderated by Marisol Argueta de Barillas, Head of the Regional Agenda for Latin America and Member of the Executive Committee of the World Economic Forum.
In addition to President Petro, the Presidents of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chávez Robles, and of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, and the Vice President of the Dominican Republic, Raquel Peña, intervened as panelists.
In his speech, the Head of State referred to the Total Peace that is sought in Colombia, of which he said that this goes through the debate to the fight against drugs.
To support the failure of this global fight, the Colombian President said that there are “millions of prisoners in the United States, the majority black; a million deaths in Latin America, the majority Colombians; organizations that are no longer the ones that appear on television like Pablo Escobar but true powerful multinationals of the transfer of substances throughout the world, which are leaving all over America, for example, the most violent cities and towns in the world if they are measured by homicide rate”.
“We cannot pacify Colombia except with a territorial and macro vision, that is, if we do not debate the anti-drug policy that has failed to date with the United States, we have serious problems,” he said, adding that “we have started this dialogue, it should not be Colombia¬–the United States, it should be with the Americas in front of the world, because politics has to vary”.
For this reason, he stressed that “it is no longer a Colombian problem, it is a multinational problem, with some dominant organizations such as those that have criminally established themselves in Mexico that manage to have a dominant position.”
For this reason, he noted that “we cannot pacify if the excluded regions of Colombia, where the greatest violence in the country takes place, do not achieve inclusion in social policy” and by using the situation of Tumaco (Nariño) as an example, which has the highest rates of cocaine production on the planet, he assured that the policy would be “a system of prosperity, where the world could even help.”
He gave as an example that “instead of coca leaf crops, which are tens of thousands of hectares, we could have cocoa crops and the cocoa transformed there, not exported raw but transformed there as chocolate, one could buy Nestlé”, for which he emphasized: “It could be, perhaps, one of the main instruments for peace in Colombia as long as we understand that we must also change the global anti-drug policy that has failed resoundingly.”