Xiomara Castro: Capitalism Is the ‘Main Environmental Executioner’

The president of Honduras denounced that the Global North generates the most pollution and proposed seven urgent measures, including the conversion of foreign debt and punishing the genocide in Gaza.

The president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, used her speech at COP30 in Belém do Pará, Brazil, to denounce capitalism as the “main environmental executioner” and demand global climate justice.

In this sense, the president affirmed that, just as the 1994 Convention signed in the same Brazilian city enshrined the right of women to live free from violence, “the earth also has the right to live free from abuse, exploitation and violence.”

The president, who chairs the Coalition of Tropical Forest Countries, said that the Summit “gives back to the South the voice of hope and life.”

Castro denounced “climate inequality,” noting that “100 corporations generate 71% of polluting emissions” and that the Global North, with only 10% of the population, produces more than half of the gases that destroy the climate, while maintaining that climate change “is an open wound that bleeds in our peoples.”

The Honduran head of state reiterated the seven urgent measures she proposed at COP28, among which are: the immediate cessation of wars to ensure peace with respect for international law, condemning terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism and declared that “the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza cannot go unpunished.”

She also mentioned as essential the conversion of the external debt of creditor countries and credit agencies to implement environmental development plans.

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She also emphasized including environmental crimes in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court to punish companies and governments, in addition to eradicating predatory profit and reducing the irrational consumption of resources by industrialized powers.

During his speech, Castro also asserted that “Refounding Honduras” meant returning dignity, sovereignty and the green soul to the country, reversing the “looting, impunity, public-private corruption” and the delivery of natural resources of the “narco-dictatorship” imposed on the country three times the 2009 coup d’état.

She reported that his government created three environmental battalions, reduced deforestation in protected areas by more than 90% and will sign its first international agreement to mobilize sovereign climate finance. In this sense, he ruled that “the environmental refoundation is also an act of sovereignty” by not granting a single new concession on its natural assets.

President Castro’s speech at COP30 positioned the Global South as the planet’s vital reserve, while denouncing neocolonial dynamics and capitalist exploitation as causes of climate inequality and violence. Their participation is aligned with the call for regional integration and sovereignty in the face of the polluting powers of the North