Statement by the President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay before the United Nations General Assembly New York, September 2026 Mr. President of the General Assembly, Mr. Secretary-General, Ladies and gentlemen Heads of State and Government, Ladies and gentlemen, First of all, it is fitting to greet this American people who 250 years ago (a quarter of a millennium) decided and understood that people possess rights.
That the right to life, liberty and happiness had to be the guide of every government.
And that the governed decide who the rulers will be.
We in the south of America inherited those standards 50 years later.
Cheers!
I appear before this Assembly on behalf of a young country, but one with deeply rooted traditions.
A country that has learned, throughout its history, that governing is not only administering resources or institutions.
Governing is, above all, working for the well-being of people.
That has been one of Uruguay’s great purposes: to build a society in which dignity, freedom, coexistence and opportunities can be part of the daily lives of its citizens.
And if there is one word that sums up a good part of our vocation as a country, that word is peace.
We do not conceive of peace simply as the absence of war.
We understand it as a permanent construction: the possibility for people to live, work, educate their children, develop their projects and look to the future without fear.
Uruguay has been, with its virtues and also, like every country, with its shadows, a country that has sought to resolve its differences through institutions, through dialogue and through the search for agreements.
In this Assembly we reaffirm our permanent willingness to contribute to peacekeeping missions, with a profound sense of responsibility and solidarity.
Uruguayan men and women can testify to the value this tool has when it comes to alleviating suffering and ensuring respect for the human life of the most defenceless populations.
Continue to count on Uruguay for that.
We are not a country of great stridency.
We are, rather, a country of great convictions.
And one of those convictions is that the construction of peace is never “finished”.
We cannot take it for granted.
Each generation has the responsibility to build it again.
There cannot be one peace for some and another peace for others.
There is no suffering that matters more because it occurs closer by, nor lives that are worth less because they were born in another territory.
When people suffer, humanity as a whole has a responsibility.
When a people are displaced, when a family loses its home, when young people find no way out and see their mental health threatened.
When a child grows up under the roar of weapons, when millions of people live in poverty or with no opportunity at all, we cannot remain indifferent.
Nor can we be indifferent to the pain implied by an endless state of war, the fear and pain generated by organized crime, the permanent threat of terrorism, the repression that arises from tyranny, or the suffering caused by a tight economic blockade such as that suffered by the Cuban people.
We do not believe that positioning oneself on one side or another of a war, a confrontation or a dispute necessarily helps to resolve it.
Many times, on the contrary, it deepens divisions.
Our commitment is another: to seek paths of understanding, to open spaces for dialogue and to help conflicts find a peaceful solution.
That does not mean indifference.
It does not mean relativizing suffering.
It does not mean disregarding responsibilities.
It means understanding that peace requires something more difficult than taking sides: it requires working so that that confrontation can end as soon as possible.
And for that we also need to recover something that, at times, seems to have been lost in international debate: humility.
We Uruguayans have an expression that sums up a way of understanding coexistence: “no one is more than anyone else”.
No country owns the absolute truth.
No nation has a monopoly on solutions.
No society can claim that its historical experience is universal.
And no people should be condemned to choose between models imposed from outside.
Our way of understanding relations among countries arises from that notion of humility.
A humility that does not mean weakness.
On the contrary: it means recognizing our own limitations and, at the same time, trusting in the capacity of others.
We come from a country diverse in its opinions, but deeply committed to the possibility of building a common future.
And we believe that that combination —diversity in ideas and cohesion in the future— can also be our contribution to the international community.
Today we are living through a particularly difficult time.
Extreme inequality continues to be one of the great threats to coexistence.
Poverty continues to deprive millions of people of basic opportunities.
And wars continue to destroy lives, communities and hopes.
While we discuss growth, technology, artificial intelligence, energy transition or new forms of production, there are millions of people who continue to ask themselves something much more basic: how to feed their children, how to gain access to housing, how to get a job or how to live tomorrow without fear.
We cannot lose sight of that reality.
Development makes sense when it improves people’s lives.
The economy makes sense when it is at the service of society.
Technology makes sense when it expands our freedoms and our opportunities.
And politics makes sense when it is capable of transforming reality to bring happiness to our people.
We speak from the experience of a small country, far from the great centres of power, but convinced that our size cannot determine our capacity to contribute, much less affect our dignity.
We need multilateral institutions that are more effective, more representative, closer to people and capable of responding to the challenges of our time.
We need cooperation.
We need solidarity.
And we also need to show austerity in these spheres.
But above all, we need to trust again in our collective capacity to change things.
Because, deep down, the very idea of well-being and progress is born of something profoundly human: the ability to recognize suffering and to refuse to accept inertia.
The human being is creative precisely because he does not resign himself.
He perceives that which hurts.
He perceives that which can be different.
And then the desire to change appears.
That desire to change is, perhaps, one of the deepest testimonies of our freedom.
And when our peoples advance on the path to progress they generally do so wielding the powerful magic of freedom.
Knowing that freedom does not consist only in choosing among possibilities.
It also consists in having the means to transform that which we want to change for the good of the whole community.
Our freedom becomes fuller when we are capable of expanding the freedom of others.
When we change our societies through dialogue.
When we build fairer institutions.
When we carry out meaningful works that endure beyond our own lives.
When a school opens its doors.
When a child gains access to that opportunity that he did not have before.
When a community manages to overcome a division.
When two countries that were at odds finally find a path of understanding.
Today we are more than eight billion people inhabiting the same planet.
Eight billion different stories.
Eight billion hopes.
Eight billion possibilities.
We are not a finished humanity.
We are a humanity in the making.
Every morning we have the possibility of deciding what world we want to leave to those who come after.
We can accept inequality as inevitable.
We can accept war as permanent.
We can accept poverty as destiny.
We can accept that distrust replace dialogue.
Or we can choose another path.
The more difficult path, but also the more human one.
Uruguay comes to this Assembly today with that conviction.
With the humility and respect proper to a small country.
But also with the firmness of one who knows the value of his principles.
We come to say that peace is not a utopia.
It is permanent work.
No conflict is definitively resolved with more conflict.
No society becomes safer when hopelessness becomes the norm.
No country can build its well-being in isolation.
The future of humanity will depend, to a large extent, on our ability to understand that we are deeply interconnected.
We are different. We think differently.
We have different histories.
We have different interests...
This is not between “bad” and “good”.
We know full well that many times the “good” quickly become “bad”, or those whom yesterday we harshly condemned magically become benchmarks of our “alliance for good” But we share one planet and, ultimately, one destiny.
The United Nations has more reason to exist every day, and it must inexorably evolve at the pace of the geopolitical changes that are succeeding one another at breakneck speed.
Each and every one of the Nations that make it up must be an active part of the organization, each to the greatest extent that its capacities permit.
It is clear that the effort must be focused on being an updated organization, properly supported, with fair decision-making that must be complied with.
The borders of countries cannot depend on human whims, they must indeed be protected and respected as the defined limits for maintaining the identities, idiosyncrasies and sense of belonging of their respective populations.
We cannot continue to be hostages to the will of a few countries that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
And one cannot yield to reasons of prevailing economic convenience, The objective is clear, it is to achieve lasting stability that allows all the effort of citizens and their respective Governments to be channelled towards the generation of prosperity, far removed, to be sure, from the destruction and suffering caused by wars.
We have a commitment; let us honour it.
The history that is to prevail is the one we write every day with our own actions.
For all these reasons Uruguay will continue to commit itself to dialogue, to multilateralism, to cooperation, to international law and to the peaceful settlement of disputes.
And, above all, to the dignity of every human being.
Humanity continues to refuse to consider itself definitively made.
And that is, perhaps, our greatest hope.
That we can still change.
That we can still learn.
That we can still build.
That we can still choose peace.
And this simple fact finally alerts us to the shadowless purity of the idea that “We are and transform ourselves together.”
It contributes little to the objectives of the United Nations to use this rostrum only to accuse and attack.
The fire does not need more fuel.
Let us make better use of this occasion And another opportunity was demolished for Peace.
Because the relationship between States, Like the relationship between good people, Brings happiness if we avoid going around exchanging blows or elbowing one another.
Thank you very much.