The former President of the Republic offered an interview to the journalist Gabriel Díaz Campanella, from the Spanish newspaper The countryin which he shared a series of visions on the political reality of Latin America, as well as what he understands of the global reality, in the midst of armed conflicts and international confrontations.
First, he began by talking about what the global health crisis of COVID-19 left him: “The UN prognosis is catastrophic. It scares me very much”, says this 87-year-old political reference, ex-president and historical leader of the world left. “I think that the pandemic served to expose some of the weaknesses that we as humanity have today. And one of them is that the ownership of knowledge had much more value than the human need to contribute to being able to collectivize knowledge. Vaccine systems could have expanded much faster and that ended up costing millions of lives,” Mujica said.
He understands that “science did not fail, what failed was politics, which did not have the capacity to coerce the economic system to be able to do what had to be done quickly.”
He also reflected on the 150 million people who have fallen into food insecurity since the pandemic: “This would have to be confronted with a figure that we do not manage, of how much is the value of what we could call the luxury economy or waste economy, to show ourselves to ourselves that there are actually resources, but that we are not using them as we should. On the one hand, there is hunger, but there are also calculations that 25 or 30% of food is thrown away”.
He added that, in his opinion, the responsibility for this “is political”, because “we know what is happening”. “Humanity has created a remarkable civilization; it captured science, it multiplied productivity and the variety of things, but we cannot stop it, we cannot redirect it. This is, perhaps, the last globalization of man, if he does not correct it. There have been several, because Rome was a globalization, the history of the Chinese empire as well. But they all had political direction. This is a globalization that is being carried out by the interests of the market, where politics is a pale bystander following behind”, he continued.
war is prehistory
In a world in which dozens of countries throughout the world are engaged in bloody military conflicts, Pepe Mujica said in the interview with the Spanish media that “as long as we have to use war as an expression of political failure, we will not have come out of prehistory”.
And he expanded: “It is very likely that humanity is spending no less than 2.5 million dollars per minute on military expenses. It is one of the most colossal stupidities that can exist ”.
“70% of arms sales are in the hands of the permanent members of the UN Security Council: the US, Russia, China, France and the UK, according to Amnesty International. How is it possible to aspire to peace?” Díaz Campanella asked him, and the former president and former senator replied: “The manufacture of weapons becomes a diplomatic tool, of influence, and becomes an economic force that operates in governments, because there is a lobby of the arms force”.
“If the new generations do not take action on the matter, on the ecological issue, on the issue of war… There is nothing more important than young people discussing this world! We have to change the culture, ”she rounded off.
