The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, affirmed that “migration is going to be the sign of the times”, with large movements of people globally due to the aggravation of the climate crisis.
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Petro, in a colloquium with students at Sciences Po, the most important university center for political studies in France, assured that the climate crisis and the growing scarcity of water are going to fuel “more and more and more” the immigration of Africans to Europe and of Latin Americans to North America.
“In the north, the ideas of self-defense, of xenophobia are going to grow more and more,” he said, predicting a future world marked by “political tensions.” Therefore, he predicted that “from a negative point of view, we are approaching a year 1933” (the year the Nazis came to power in Germany) but on a global scale “.
“From a positive point of view, the inability of world leadership to direct the transition and overcome the problem forces the appearance of a new political subject, which cannot be other than humanity itself,” he argued.
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The climate crisis and its consequences were the protagonists of a large part of the colloquium, with Petro recently arrived from COP 27, clad in a maroon sweater and awaited with great interest by the students, many of them Latin American and Spanish. The Colombian president recalled his words at COP 27, which is being held in the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheikh, and described as “alms” the aid that developed countries give to those in development to mitigate the consequences of climate change.
He considered that the emissions that cause the greenhouse effect are based on social inequality, and that in order to solve the climate crisis “our idea of wealth would have to change, not one conceived in accumulating and having, but in existing.”
Petro also lamented that Latin American countries “have wasted” the money obtained from the export of fossil fuels, and later they will face the challenge of supplying those incomes through the lower use of those resources at a global level. He compared how other large hydrocarbon exporting countries, such as Norway or the Arabs, created sovereign wealth funds fed by export money decades ago, which have made international investments from which they obtain financial income.
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Latin American countries “have eaten their surplus, they have squandered it,” Petro said. Regarding Venezuela, a country he recently visited, he considered “a good sign” if Caracas and Washington talk, and stressed that it is necessary for the Venezuelan political actors to agree on “a fundamental coexistence pact, that the one who loses (an election) does not have to be removed”.
In Europe, he lamented that social democracy, his political referent, “disintegrated”, except in some countries like Spain, “and does not present an alternative program to the climate crisis”.
This act was Petro’s first on his first visit to France after taking office.
EFE
