(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Derechos para los árboles, no para los humanos)
More than 40 European parliamentarians have crossed the Atlantic and travelled to Lima to hold the twice-yearly summit of the Euro-Lat Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together members of the European Parliament with members of the three Ibero-American transnational parliaments. It is one more of the very many mass-delegation trips the European Parliament undertakes at immense expense and habitually with scant results, when not null or, worse still, laughable.
It is always good for parliamentarians from different regions of the world to see one another. Although it would be advisable that they be real parliamentarians and not the hired thugs of dictatorships, as are the supposed deputies of the supposed parliaments of Cuba and Venezuela who were present there, to the shame of everyone. But well applauded by the European socialists. Of course, the European People’s Party, which now provides the president of the European side of the EuroLat Assembly with Gabriel Mato, is as complicit in the insufferable attendance of dictatorships’ hired thugs at the EuroLat summits as the socialist Javi López was in the last legislature. In the final document all the allusions to dictatorships in America disappeared.
In spite of all this, attendance is imperative. Even though many of the debates are grotesque precisely because of the control the left holds over these gatherings, the attendance of the national, patriotic and conservative forces, committed to the fight against narco-socialism and the organised crime of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group which control the entire Ibero-American left and by now no small part of the European one, is very important. Today there is, thanks to Vox, a very firm and mobilised interest among those European forces in carrying the cultural and anti-socialist battle to these forums as well, which until little more than five years ago were courtesy meetings where the European side was entirely Spanish and in which the left imposed all its messages and the Populars considered themselves satisfied if they managed to strip out of the joint reports and documents a few passages made preposterous by communists and radicals.
That is why, withstanding all the revulsion generated by the spectacles of corrupt consensus enjoyed by the dwindling majority of Populars, Socialists, Greens and Communists in the European Parliament, attendance at these gatherings is little short of obligatory. If only in order to raise one’s voice at some moment against the follies forged there in messages from the Ibero-American left which the European social democratic consensus is accustomed to dilute a little and then take on as its own.
The follies are not minor ones. And many no longer come only from Andean or Central American communists but from European ecologists and socialists. It says everything that the greatest achievement of this gathering should have been to prevent the approval of an absolutely delirious and little short of diabolical report that seeks to grant rights of their own to trees, plants, rivers and, of course, animals.
That is the European left today, with which the Populars have pacts in the European Parliament in order to snatch every post from the groups to their right, especially from Patriots, in which Vox is integrated. Vox in fact had the right, under the D’Hondt system, to occupy a vice-presidency of the European Assembly of EuroLat, and it was snatched away by an agreement between Populars, Socialists and the far left.
That left is the one that wants to give rights to trees, though not to the Spanish olive trees they are uprooting by the hundreds of thousands, but denies them to Venezuelans, to Cubans, to Bolivians and Nicaraguans. They want rivers to have the right not to be dammed or channelled, but they support the repression of narco-socialism throughout Ibero-America which leaves ever more thousands of political prisoners without rights and dismantles institutions as a team coordinated with Pedro Sánchez in Spain.
This report was signed not by some lunatic chieftain and witch doctor from the ranks of Evo Morales but by a Spanish socialist MEP, César Luena, a socialist from La Rioja who amuses himself with his co-religionists by seeking forceful ways to destroy every possibility of living off the land, of maintaining a profitable and viable agriculture and of achieving growth, increased well-being and prosperity. Luena was not alone. All the socialists and the European left supported this lunatic report, which was defeated thanks to Ibero-American votes together with the European centre and right.
This same Luena is the rapporteur of the preposterous and criminal European Nature Restoration Regulation, which takes shape in a terrifying picture of social engineering and destruction of infrastructure with a radical and anti-human vision of ecology. With a farewell to ethnocentrism and to all respect for the interests of human beings and of peoples and nations, in one monstrosity and the other he seeks to do away with a nature at the service of man and to sacrifice the human being for the sake of a nature that comes to hold rights of its own. The socialists want to promote the legal recognition of animals, mountains, rivers and trees as subjects of law, placing them on an equal footing with human beings.
So the Lima summit ended with socialists who lost their bid to give rights to nature in order to strip human beings of every right to exploit crops, animals and plants and natural resources so as to live reasonably from them. But it is as well that everyone should know that they lost thanks to reasonable deputies from the Hispanic countries. And that they should remember that these socialists, who between corruption and ideological delirium are a mortal danger to any nation and society, continue to maintain a firm coalition, as Esteban González Pons likes to say, with the European People’s Party.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
