Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

2 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | 8 th O ctober 1983 Belisario Betancur was President of the Republic of Colombia from 1982 to 1986. — Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Ibero-American Cooperation on 8/10/1983. Daily peace, as essential as daily bread, is the result of justice. Sometimes it seems as if we are only joined together by the subversive common denominator of being unfair with each other, under the cover of archaic institutions with unequal opportunities in order to continue being unequal, in which the ruling classes dominate but do not represent, knowing that democracy lives due to participation and dies due to imposition and poverty. For that reason, destroying poverty must be humanity’s only war. To change the armour of soldiers for a fertile willingness towards dialogue that becomes a beacon in this new dwelling place of man, that is the image of our dream. In that we shall leave our mark, defeating the obstacles of the saga of the Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude by our Nobel Laureate García Márquez, when he says that “Aureliano spent his days making little gold fish during the day, only to melt them down at night.” Similarly, contemporary man spends his time building schemes that the dementia of power undoes. On the other shore, being fair is becoming increasingly more difficult; we are full of ideas and intentions for peace, but short on actions, on a continent for which the pariah president Marco Fidel Suárez said that “the fate of humanity is to make progress suffering”. Is man tied to the mast of his instinct, condemned to fight tooth and nail, cruisers and missiles? Just and unjust alike, are we destined to walk the earth breathlessly hacking our way through the blind foliage of ideologisms? Belisario Betancur — Prince of Asturias Award for Ibero-American Cooperation 1983 Laureates. Excerpts