 Good evening to you all. Good evening to my compatriots, Brazilians. Welcome, all visitors. I hope you have a fantastic time while you're here in Brazil. But please be careful because Brazil is a very violent country. Actually, Brazil is the single country in the world. It's the country with the highest number of deaths by armed violence. In fact, in Brazil, you're more likely to be shot to death than in wartime Afghanistan. This is not a train, just ours. Actually, most of Latin America is incredibly violent. As you can see here, this is the table of the highest murder levels in the world. Most of the countries in the top are in Latin America or the Caribbean. Why is it so? This has not always been the case. Latin America has not always been such a violent place. It had pretty reasonable levels of violence in the past. Why did it change? It changed in the 80s when Ronald Reagan decided to escalate Richard Nixon's war on drugs. He started heavily funding security forces in Colombia in order to end the supply of drugs to the United States. The thing is that the supply didn't end. The supply didn't end because the demand never ended. The supply didn't end because the demand didn't end. It's so easy to produce and to process and to hide cocaine. It's so ridiculously, so insanely profitable to do commerce with cocaine that there will always be someone willing to take the risk. There will always be someone willing to sell drugs to the United States. With this riot and repression, what happened is that drug dealers responded with even more violence led at the time by the monster Pablo Escobar. Violence skyrocketed in Colombia. But this business is so ridiculously profitable that there was a surge. The result of this rise in repression was a surge in innovation in this business. The cocaine business became very innovative. What they did is that they created several new routes to take the cocaine north. These routes started crossing many other countries. Every country that was touched by one of these routes would see a similar surge in violence. This is how Latin America became such a violent peace of the world. This is how Latin America became the most violent peace of land in the world. The war on drugs isn't a metaphor for us here. It's a metaphor for Latin Americans. It's a very real war. People are killed. Most of us here don't actually fight this war, but this war has been fought among us. It's been fought very close to us and every once in a while it touches our life and it's always tragic when it happens. This war is hindering our development. It's corrupting our police. It's corrupting our justice and our governments. It's getting in the way of our institutions. It's hurting our democracy and it's killing our people. So we are paying a really, really high price for this war and we don't actually get much in return for that as you can see here. Imagine that this little green rectangle is one billion dollars. This is how much the Colombian cocaine industry makes in one year. 300 billion dollars and this is how much stays in Colombia. 7.8 billion dollars which is like 2.5% of the total. What happens to the rest? All the rest is sent to big banks in the US and Europe and it merges with the legal economy and it never comes back. It never returns to Latin America. So what I'm saying here is that Latin America is paying a really high price for these war and drugs and it's not getting anything in return. I traveled to several countries last year trying to find out if there is any more rational way of dealing with this issue in order to write a book. So one good example I found was the example of Portugal which convinced me that there are lots of better ways to deal with this issue. Actually, less violent ways of dealing with this issue not only make all this violence, all this killing unnecessary but they actually are a lot more effective in helping us dealing with the problems caused by drugs. The Portuguese example is a really good one. What Portugal did basically was that they started taking care of people instead of arresting them and killing them. The results were so good that both analysts from the right and the left agreed that the system is an outstanding success. This book is a book written by a right-wing organization linked to the Republican Party in the United States. I met this guy just last week. He's a smart guy, a young guy, a really sad guy. This guy's name is Sebastián Marroquín, but this is not actually his real name. He was born Juan Pablo Escobar. He happens to be the son of Pablo Escobar, the monster. He lives in Argentina. He was 14 years old when his father was killed. He ran away. He's been hiding in Argentina in shame for his whole life. He became an architect and a few years ago he decided to get out and talk about this. Not only that, he started searching for people who were sons of the people his father had killed. He met many of them and he said he was sorry. This is him meeting the son of a very important conservative Colombian politician. They met, they became friends, they cried together, they hugged. Both of them said that they want the war and drugs to end so that there won't be any other Pablo Escobar in the future. Both of them say they favor ways to regulate the sale of certain drugs so that the financial power of drug dealers in Latin America won't be so big in the future. I think that these people teach us, teach all of us and teach our countries and teach our continent, the Americas, a very important lesson which is a lesson of reconciliation. I think that all of us must learn with them how to look back to our past and how to recognize the mistakes and the sins and the errors of our parents. And also we can learn from them how to look to the future and try to plan a world, a system for a world where we want our sons and our daughters and our grandsons and granddaughters to live. So the idea I want to share with you is this. Please support reconciliation. Please support the end of the war on drugs. Thank you.