Last week, the UN General Assembly offered an unbeatable opportunity to evaluate and compare the merits of some leaders who often appear on the front pages of the international press. Let's get to the point.

The inaugural address, which is always given by the president of the United States, showed a Donald Trump more unrestrained than usual, resorting to all kinds of falsehoods and inconsistencies. He began by stating that "America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth. This is indeed the Golden Age of America.”

It is obvious that his ”inflammatory speech", as described by an openly pro-Yankee newspaper such as La Nación in Argentina, speaks more to the fantasies that cloud the mind of the elderly president than to the hard facts that overwhelm the contemporary reality of the United States. There is an undeniable parallel between Trump's discursive pathology, an extreme case of egocentrism, and that which characterizes the insatiable sycophant who inhabits the Casa Rosada, Javier Milei: both see auspicious signs amid the debacle.

The US economy is plagued by serious structural problems: it is burdened by a monstrous public debt of $37 trillion, which is equivalent to 123% of its GDP. It has a projected public deficit for 2025 of 6.1% of GDP, which means that, according to Milei, Trump would be the very embodiment of a “fiscal degenerate or debauched”; and a trade imbalance of around $918 billion in 2024.

When it comes to the concentration of wealth, the US figures can only be described as scandalous: the richest 10% own just over 70% of the national wealth, while 90% of the population struggles to get their hands on the crumbs of the remaining 30%. Other indicators belie the illusory “golden age” proclaimed by Trump in his speech: a decline in industrial competitiveness, the insane hegemony of parasitic financial capital, the impoverishment of the middle classes, and a growing lag in the race for new technologies compared to China.

In addition, in his speech he took credit for ending seven wars, a notorious delusion; he said that in a few months he managed to repel what he called a colossal invasion penetrating America’s southern border and composed of people of the worst kind: bandits who escaped from prisons (or were deliberately released by governments hostile to the US to export crime across the border), patients who have escaped from psychiatric institutions and drug traffickers.

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Intoxicated by his own words, Trump threatened to use the “supreme power of the US military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolás Maduro.” He condemned the “terrorists of Hamas for their atrocities” but remained shamefully silent about the industrial-scale genocide being carried out by the Zionist Israeli regime with the strong support of Washington and European governments. And despite his repeated references to terrorism, Trump made no mention of the scandalous presence at the General Assembly of Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, former leader of the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, who, with the help of "Israel" and the United States, overthrew Bashar al-Assad and took office as president of Syria under the name Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The blessing of the United States and the “democratic” powers of the West worked the miracle of turning a serial killer and executioner of infidels and opponents into a respectable leader of a Middle Eastern country. The truth is that those “democratic” powers of the West are disgusting.

In contrast, the speeches by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Gustavo Petro were sober, grounded in empirical data (the polar opposite of Trump's delusions) and highly eloquent. Lula harshly attacked Washington for undermining Brazilian sovereignty by interfering in the trial of Jair Bolsonaro for his participation in the failed coup attempt on January 8, 2023. Not only that, he also accused the United States of being “an accomplice to genocide in Gaza” and condemned the bombing of boats in the Caribbean, about which nothing was known: whether they were migrants, drug traffickers, fishermen, how many there were, or how their alleged drug cargo was not seized by US forces.

In line with this criticism, the Brazilian president condemned Cuba's recent inclusion on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, while urging the need for dialogue between Venezuela and the United States and advocating for progress in reforming the UN and the World Trade Organization in order to eradicate unilateral coercive measures that undermine international trade and cause enormous suffering among the affected populations.

Gustavo Petro gave a longer and, at the same time, more belligerent speech in relation to the US government. I would venture to say that, due to its forthright radicalism, it was a kind of continuation of President Hugo Chávez's famous speech at that same podium in 2006, when he denounced that “Yesterday the devil was here, in this very place, it still smells of sulfur,” in reference to the presence of George W. Bush (Jr). Petro criticized Washington's anti-drug policy. It is an absolute failure, he said, but it is a very convenient pretext for extorting the peoples and governments of Latin America. He also criticized the killing of “poor and unarmed young people” by US missiles in Caribbean waters, a crime that the Trump administration committed again today, this Friday, while I write this article, in a display of coward savagery.

After demonstrating that it was his government that fought drug trafficking in Colombia most effectively, he said that this was perhaps the reason why the Trump administration “decertified” his government because it allegedly failed to collaborate in Washington's fight against drug trafficking. Like Lula, he described what was happening in Gaza as genocide, but he went a step further: he proposed the creation of an international armed force under the General Assembly, rather than the discredited UN Security Council, with sufficient powers to stop the genocide being carried out by the Zionist regime in Israel. Petro ended his brilliant speech, part of which was improvised beyond the document he had brought with him, with a fervent defense of renewable energy to put an end to environmental destruction and the climate catastrophe exacerbated by Trump's policies of irresponsibly promoting the expansion of fossil fuel use.

The exception to these two demonstrations of Latin American dignity was Argentine President Javier Milei, who unreservedly praised Donald Trump's administration in the United States and showed that his passion for being the empire's biggest bootlicker knows no bounds. To his absolute subordination to Washington’s desires, which today dictates Argentina's economic policy, he adds his criminal defense of the neo-Nazi regime in "Israel" and his total denial of the Palestinian genocide. With Milei, Argentina is isolated not only from its Latin American neighbors but from almost all the countries of the Global South.

Argentina's votes in the UN General Assembly show almost total coincidence with those of the United States and "Israel", something that did not even exist during the government of Carlos S. Menem, who had proclaimed the need to maintain a policy of “carnal relations” with the country to the north. It must be said that Milei's abject submission to Washington's dictates is an aberration that is unprecedented in Argentine history and which, we hope, can be duly corrected sooner rather than later.