Mexican leader calls on world’s richest to help poorest, stop slide into ‘barbarity’

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told the U.N. Security Council that this proposal could generate around $1 trillion annually, which should go directly to the world's poorest people.

Mexico’s president warned Tuesday that the world is sliding from “civilization to barbarity” and called for the thousand richest people, the thousand largest private corporations and the 20 major economies to improve life for the 750 million people now existing on less than $2 dollars a day.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told the U.N. Security Council that this proposal could generate around $1 trillion annually, which should go directly to the world’s poorest people “without any intermediaries, through a card or personalized electronic wallet.”

In a scathing speech to the U.N.’s most powerful body, the Mexican leader sharply criticized the world’s nations for not addressing corruption in all its forms — political, moral, economic, legal, fiscal and financial — which he called “the main problem of the planet.”

Lopez Obrador, on only his second foreign trip since taking office in December 2018, was presiding over the council, where Mexico is serving a two-year term and holds the presidency this month. The country chose the topic of Tuesday’s meeting: “Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Exclusion, Inequality and Conflicts.”

As an example of exclusion and inequality, he pointed to the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, where pharmaceutical companies sold 94% and only 6% went to the U.N. World Health Organization’s COVAX program for distribution to poor countries.

“The spirit of cooperation is losing ground to the desire for profit, and this is leading us to slide from civilization into barbarity,” Lopez Obrador warned. “We are moving forward, alienated, forgetting moral principles, and turning our backs on the pain of humanity.”

“If we are not able to reverse these trends through specific actions, we will not be able to resolve any of the other problems affecting the peoples of the world,” he said.

Lopez Obrador said in the coming days Mexico will propose to the U.N. General Assembly “a world plan for fraternity and well-being” to guarantee the right to a decent life for 750 million people trying to exist on less than $2 a day.