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R. Carazo: A Culture of Peace Requires Human Rights and Justice
Written by H.E. Rodrigo Carazo, President, Republic of Costa Rica
Monday, February 18, 2002
Address to Assembly 2002, “Establishing a Culture of Peace: Worldviews, Institutions, Leadership, and Practice; The Search for Solutions to Critical Problems,” February 18, 2002
The struggle for a culture of peace begins with disarmament. We think this in our country, and, as a result abolished the army. Ever since, we joke that, in our country we are the strongest nation on the earth, having no weapons. It is the only way to guarantee not having confrontation.
We are gathered here today, with the best of intentions, but conscious that we are thinking about the future of the planet within a distorted environment of particularly selfish interests, of attitudes motivated by ignorance which in turn are the product of gross misinformation. We have been promised stability and steady progress, but the results are far from those that could have been expected. Government groups have designed a type of economy which only benefits a few and takes all the wealth for themselves, make the rest of us follow behind and fill our needs only with our own illusions.
Those who control the decision-making process, supported by transnational capitalism and greed, create a fallacy that they call organization. It’s a system by which the markets, designed to serve the capitalist few, have been modeled to make us believe that wealth will eventually reach down to the needy, overflowing from a full container of profit-oriented activities and transactions. As a result, we find a world that reflects the outrageous growth of poverty and unemployment, a tremendous disparity in the distribution of economic resources, and the horrific vision of millions of men, women and children going hungry amid a global society in which the economy nurtures the specter of abundance.
The global economy which models the outpouring of limited benefits to the few is presented as the only solution to these problems. This fails to address the evident need to provide a basic structure of equality and fairness. The model has generated and promotes an apartheid which marginalizes the poor to one side, where they constantly increase their number by millions, and an increasingly smaller minority on the other side, which concentrates the economic resources and uses them to increase and protect their selfish interest in the utmost disregard of the basic principles of respect for human dignity and solidarity among mankind.
The culture of peace is a way of life in which mutual respect produces social integration. There can be no peace if the respect for the other’s rights does not prevail. There can be no peace unless true justice prevails among persons. Outside pressures condition, dominate and corrupt our leaders, many of them to a point where the countries they lead lose their national identity, their basic condition of freedom, and their dignity; elements that assist them in resisting prevailing corruption. Corruption is the most difficult and violent form of destruction because it affects the majority. It also translates into generalized violence and projects present destruction onto forthcoming generations. In our democratic societies, if we evaluate the ways by which the political groups carry out their purposes, we conclude that the lack of accountability we are experiencing is a product of others wanting to accommodate our countries into formulae in which they do not fit. We, as citizens of a free world, constitute the determining factor for creating and producing social wealth. Together we should all work toward the welfare and peace of all peoples of the planet by opposing the model that is being imposed on us with the strong belief that if we are able to use our own intellect and willpower we shall find our way out.
The prevailing economic forces are strongly united by a dominant ideology formed by powerful classes and countries and international financial institutions that, together with transnational corporations, is closed to discussion and public consultation. Their mechanisms are circuitous, and agreements are signed in the highest places in obvious disregard of the interests of the people. We must defend a world order which promotes economic development with solidarity, quality, modernity and efficiency in providing the services needed by all the population, not just a few, an order dedicated to welfare without annoying bureaucrats and atrocious privileges.
We must defend an order that fosters the activities of the honest business community in rural and urban areas. Businesses must have improved means to work and to modernize the production facilities so they may better compete in the international market. We need an order concerned with production efficiency, the opening of market and investment opportunities, but at the same time we must defend an order which, on behalf of society, is able to reach a long-term sustainable agreement to ensure that all wealth will be distributed with improved equality so as to protect dignity and workers’ rights, and so that together the business community, the workers, and the state may become firm defenders of independence and sovereignty for all the people. This is, my friends, the main objective of world peace.
This is the way to a new culture of peace, the struggle to eradicate the sources of injustice, to provide for the main moral and political principles that constitute the basis of human life, the struggle to consolidate an attitude of solidarity among human beings without distinctions of any kind, with only the vision of happiness and tranquility that has governed the illusions of the many which have been constantly aggrieved by the few. It is a struggle, a never ending struggle that we all must assume. The culture of peacemust be a way of life in which justice shall always prevail.