The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

This is how Petro's speech was written before the UN: "Keep it, don't let anyone read it"

2022-09-21T10:40:46.339Z


The president of Colombia received a draft of his text 48 hours before his speech, and retouched it before a bumpy trip


Gustavo Petro slowly eats some spaghetti a la amatriciana, his favorite dish.

On the table lie some pages in which the speech that he will read the next day before the UN General Assembly is written.

The ministers and advisers who are accompanying him on this trip to New York spend the entire dinner waiting for him to finish and read it.

Then they can give their opinion, suggest changes, remind you of something you may have missed.

But Petro makes no move to grab the papers at any time and the evening at the Colombian embassy, ​​a classic building facing Central Park, begins to languish.

Her right hand, the chief of staff Laura Sarabia, detects in her voice traces of the acute bronchitis that she suffered a few days ago.

"I can hear your affected voice, President."

You better go rest,” he suggests.

He gets up from the table and takes the pages with him.

Neither the foreign minister who has just arrived in the US nor the intellectual Alejandro Gaviria, Minister of Education, know what he will say.

The speech that will serve as a presentation to the rest of the leaders, a circle to which he has wanted to belong for more than a decade, is a secret that has been kept among a few.

A few weeks ago, when it became known that he would have this intervention, Petro told Sarabia herself and Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, the political analyst who advised him on the campaign, that he wanted to address three issues: the fight against drugs, the protection of Amazon jungle and peace.

The two chosen ones get to work on it.

They first write a draft that Petro does not have in his hands until he arrives on Sunday morning at the Colombian air force airport in Bogotá.

The day is cold, intemperate, and a wind is blowing that goes to the hills that surround the city.

The military have been preparing the presidential plane since two in the morning.

He has arrived a little over an hour late - he is not the most punctual man in the world - and the entourage is in a hurry to take off.

Otherwise, there is a risk of being late for the first scheduled meeting, a meeting with the UN Secretary General, António Guterres.

The captain starts the engines.

The plane is about to take off.

However, an emergency pilot light on the control panel lights up.

Impossible to fly like that.

Sarabia gets off the plane to try to understand what is happening.

Those in charge of the trip do not want the president to run any risk and go up to fix the breakdown.

For a while they believe that the best solution is to travel on another plane in the back, prepared in case an incident like this occurs.

But in the end they manage to solve it and authorize the plane to take flight.

The device gains altitude soon and reaches its maximum speed.

At that moment, Petro reads the commissioned text for the first time.

Find the chosen topics there.

She takes out a pen and begins to rewrite it.

Although he is her favorite author, she removes some references to Gabriel García Márquez that had included Germán Gómez, the head of communication, who in the end also gave her a look.

His annotations lengthen the speech by four more pages.

The intervention has to last 20 minutes.

A space that is too narrow for a speaker like him, from the old Gaitanista school, accustomed to rants that go on for hours.

This is one of the great mysteries of Petro's personality: absorbed in person, almost absent at times, he transforms on the lectern.

In the new text it includes a reference to Ukraine, gives more weight to the Amazon jungle and raises the tone when referring to the anti-drug policy that the US has carried out all these years.

He returns it to Sarabia and asks something: “Keep it, don't let anyone read it”.

She reads it aloud to the president's cadence while Gomez timed her.

Then he reads it, a man from the coast who imitates well the elongated s's and the inflections of Petro's voice.

They conclude that he fits the space, that he will have no problem finishing it in a timely manner.

In the car, on the way to the Assembly, he reads it for the last time.

Make a few small changes.

Sarabia includes them and sends it to the UN for translation.

Gómez is already in the room learning to handle the teleprompter.

Petro is excited, as interpreted by those who accompany him.

He does not seem to them at that moment the shy man who seldom shares his true feelings with the rest.

Up on the lectern, dressed in a blue suit and a tie of the same color with white polka dots, he sings a harsh statement.

In him is his entire ideological corpus: anti-capitalism, environmentalism, even the anti-Americanism in which many leftists of his generation have been raised.

Without a doubt, it is the most powerful intervention in the morning.

Some believe that no Latin American president had intoned a message with such force since Chávez's famous speech in 2006: "Yesterday the devil was here, it still smells of sulfur."

He was referring to his enemy George Bush.

His wife, Verónica Alcocer, is flying from London to New York at the time.

She follows the speech minute by minute connected to the plane's Wi-Fi.

The first drops of sweat begin to appear on Petro's forehead.

"World power has become irrational," he ends.

He comes down from the lectern, eyes shining, feeling like he's said exactly what he wanted to say.

The world watches him while.

Subscribe here

to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the key information on the country's current affairs.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-09-21

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.