Gustavo Petro, Bogotá, June 3, 2024
Translated by Supriyo
Chatterjee, Tlaxcala
On June 3, 2024, in Bogotá, Colombian President Gustavo Petro was awarded the Grand Collar of the State of Palestine, the highest civilian order of the State of Palestine. Below is his acceptance speech
Photo: Andrea Puentes – Presidency
of Colombia
“The young people coming out of universities in the United States, coming out in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America, are the genuine expression of a new humanity; one that if it survives is going to build a different world, far removed from the material, much more rooted in frugality, but above all in wisdom and knowledge, where humanity no longer finds pages where some human beings kill other human beings.”
I have been awarded many decorations throughout my life. The first ones from my school, which are the ones I remember most; the medals of excellence that Father Pedro gave me -the last one he did not want to give me, but it was his turn-, and I must tell you that this is perhaps the most valuable one I have received because of what it undoubtedly means in the history of the world, in the history of resistance, and now in these fateful days we are living, which mark a point of departure in the history of mankind.
It is not just any event that we are witnessing: these are the new signs of a terrible world, but one that must also be filled with hope. It is not a world as Fukuyama dreamed, without contradictions, totally peaceful. It is a world deeply stressed by politics, perhaps more so than in the twentieth century, which experienced two world wars, which lived through the socialist revolution for almost the entire century.
The struggle between two different systems of understanding the world, of
understanding the economy, of understanding society, which could have led to a
third conflagration, undoubtedly, we were very close to it, but the
responsibility of one and the other, in the Soviet Union and in the United
States, which had already been allies in a war, an episode which is sometimes
unknown, when together they decided to fight fascism, both the American society
and the Soviet society knew very clearly that their enemy was not one of the
two, that their enemy was a third one that was beginning to advance as a kind of specter in Europe at that time, throughout the
world, carrying with it a series of criminal doctrines that
became powerful and that filled drove humanity to one of its worst pages
moments.
It cost fifty million dead to get out of that situation, and undoubtedly it
was the soldiers of the Soviet and North American peoples who, together with
many resistors in Europe, tens of thousands of people who took up arms, who did
not agree with fascism, with absolute oppression, with genocide, and
knew how to resist, in a journey that in the end was one of the great epic
battles of humanity.
