Hondura’s President Xiomara Castro Sarmiento’s speech to the UN General Assembly yesterday was distinguished by how she addressed the collapse of the current neoliberal system and the great war in Ukraine as a single unit. After speaking of the poverty, drug corruption, and “technological lag” faced by Honduras and the rest Ibero-America and the Caribbean — 74% of Hondurans lived in poverty when she took office in 2022, she reported — Castro turned to the global picture:
“Today the great economic interests are coming face-to-face in the war in Ukraine. In the end, those most affected are always the poorest countries and people on Earth, leveled by inflation, food shortages and high fuel prices.
“The military-industrial complex consumes the majority of the budgets of developed countries with trillions and trillions of dollars, but it contrasts with the indifference and inability to contribute to humanity and the defense of nature. The world of Bretton Woods is hitting rock bottom…. It is not a question of taking steps, but of proposing changes to the economic system that require a deep commitment to humanity and nature. There is no invisible hand; there is no `trickle-down.’ Practice teaches us that the application of global capitalism and the neoliberal model only generates misery, inequality and an insane individualism of consumer societies in the face of great privation of billions of human beings.
