Watch Your Language - Speech by President Oscar Arias Workshop with Students PeaceJam 10th Anniversary

Conference Denver, Colorado
17 September 2006, 12:30pm

Thank you very much. I know you all have many questions you'd like to ask, and I'd prefer to spend our time listening to what you have to say, so I'll keep my remarks brief and then at the end I would love to hear your questions.

Costa Rica and the Work of its President

I have been asked both to talk about my work as a President and Nobel Laureate, and to answer one big question: what can you do to make a difference? So my speech will have two parts.

Part one.
In order to talk about my work, first I have to tell you a little bit about Costa Rica. My country has a remarkable story. The story begins with one of the world's richest natural environments. The country is so small it only covers zero-point-one percent of the world's landmass, and yet it contains a colossal five percent of the world's biodiversity. Poison-dart frogs, spider monkeys, hummingbirds, toucans and jaguars all roam our forests.

There are so many new species of plants and animals being classified every day in Costa Rica that if you become friends with a Costa Rican biologist, he or she may very well name one of the new species after you. The tropical climate is perfect for agriculture. We grow rich coffee, plump bananas and the sweetest pineapples you will ever taste. You really should try a Costa Rican pineapple if you can find one; they're unbelievable.

But probably our proudest home-grown product is peace. In 1949 Costa Rica became the first country in the world to voluntarily abolish its military. Since then, we have not wasted our money on weapons, we have not thrown away our young people fighting wars, we have not trashed our creative energy in a pit of dictatorship.

Because we have a beautiful country and live peacefully upon it, people come from all over the world to visit us?more than a million and a half people every year. With the proceeds of sustainable agriculture and ecotourism, we have invested in the education and health of our people. Since 1869 education has been free and mandatory for both boys and girls. Now we have one of the most educated workforces in the world, with good English skills and a high rate of literacy.

This education has paid off. I'm not sure if you're aware what Costa Rica's leading export is. Pineapples are number three. Bananas are number two. And number one is?microchips. Intel has manufactured, distributed and developed chips here since 1998. I was excited to see that they will also be providing chips for the new I-Macs and MacBook laptops. Now I will get to call Costa Rica an "Apple" Republic.

Today all the nations of Central America are at peace. Our economies are growing. Tourism to our volcanoes, lagoons, forests and beaches is booming. But it was not always like this. Twenty years ago, when I started serving my first term as president, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador were bloodied by civil wars, and border fighting threatened to pull Honduras and even Costa Rica into the conflict.

Leftist rebels fought right-wing governments. Death squads and paramilitary groups killed the guilty with the innocent. And the Soviet Union and United States sent weapons to their chosen sides. At the time each side seemed to think that if they could just kill a few more of the enemy, just destroy a few more of its bases, just send a few more weapons to their troops, then peace would be at hand.

My administration disagreed. We took a stand opposing a violent solution to the conflicts, for as Gandhi said, "there is no road to peace. Peace is the road ."

We called on Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega to hold elections. Many refused to believe that change could come about without the threat of force. Ronald Reagan told me that no communist leader had ever left power voluntarily. I said to him, "We all know history, Mr. President. But no one is obliged to repeat it."

In August of 1987, I convinced the presidents of Central America to come together in Guatemala to try to reach a peace accord, without the interference of outside powers. I locked my fellow Presidents in a hotel room until we signed a plan to end the violence. Only by closing the back door, the door with the easy exit towards war, did we discover the threshold of peace. The exit toward peace is a narrow one. All parties cannot pass through with all of their desires and claims. In order to pass, each party must leave something on the negotiating table. In my case, in 1987, I had to accept that if I wanted everyone to agree on a peace plan that required free elections, I could not insist that the plan call for the abolition of all Central American militaries, because those militaries would have refused to abide by the plan and all would have been lost.

We must always be true to ourselves and never give up on our dreams, but in order to make progress toward those dreams, we must compromise, sometimes even if we know we are right. There is an old saying to this effect. It goes like this: "Here lies the body of William Jay, who died maintaining his right of way. He was right, dead right, as he sped along. But he's just as dead as if he were wrong."

Remember that negotiation is not about winning. It is about finding solutions that work for everyone. It can be easy to forget this.

Our fellow Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev used to tell the following story. A Russian peasant finds a lamp by the side of the road and rubs it. Out pops a genie. The genie tells the peasant he can have any wish.

The peasant tells the genie, "You know, I only have three cows, but my neighbor Igor has ten cows." The genie asks the peasant, "So do you want twenty cows?" "No," says the peasant. "I want you to kill seven of Igor's cows."

As silly as this story seems, that way of thinking can affect us all. In Order to protect ourselves we must remember Gandhi's words every day: "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

The Language of Peace and the Language of War

So that was part-one of my speech, about how peace requires both dedication and flexibility. Part two tries to answer the question, what can you all do to get involved and make a difference? The good news is we have already been making a difference here at Peace Jam. Yesterday we all worked together on service projects. Some of us wrote letters to Kofi Annan about the arms trade.

Today I want to ask for your help with a project we all can do every single day, a plan for personal change that can eventually have a global impact. It is a project about language. Here is your mission: think about your words. Your mother might have told you to "watch your language." But I do not just mean that you should not say dirty words in front of your mother.

I mean that if we want to establish peace, we must speak the language of peace. This is not easy, for the forces of war have invaded our language without our knowing it. I will speak more about this in a moment.

First, I want to give a few basic examples about how important it is to think about the words we use. Some of my favorite examples come in advertising. Sometimes companies did not think very much about their words when they translated their slogans into another language.

The Pepsi slogan, "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation," was translated into Chinese as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave." The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Ke-ku-ke-la," meaning "Bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax," depending on the dialect.

Coke then researched forty-thousand Chinese characters to find a name that sounded better, "ko-ku-kola," translating into "happiness in the mouth." Maybe the most famous mistranslation of all time took place in Latin America. The Parker Pen Company wanted to put up a billboard saying, "our pen won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you."

Unfortunately they thought the Spanish word embarazar meant "to embarrass." It means something else. So Latin Americans saw an ad that said to them, "the pens won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant." But those are just some minor examples.

On a more important level, thinking about your words is absolutely essential for peace .

My friends, I tell you today that peace is fighting an uphill battle for language. Just think about that last sentence. How many times in our conversations have we had to "fight an uphill battle," or "divide and conquer," "use our secret weapon," "round up the troops," or "call for reinforcements"?

Parents might call their child, "my little soldier" when he has to go to the dentist. An article in a computer magazine said that Google employs an "army of PhDs." I don't know about you, but images of fierce, fighting warriors are not the images that come to mind when I think of computer technicians.

How often have we called something a "war" that really is not? The "culture wars," "price wars" between Wal-Mart and Target, the "soda wars" between Pepsi and Coke, a war with the neighbors or a war with a teacher over a grade on a test. This over-eagerness to use the language of war is especially common in politics.

How many times have we heard politicians say they are "fighting" for us? "Fighting" for lower taxes, "fighting" for Social Security, "fighting" for a new highway project. I know Congress can be a tough neighborhood, but there is a difference between outright fighting and honest debate.

This use of the language of war may seem harmless, but here is the problem. Using these words and phrases makes war part of everyday life. It makes the atrocious seem commonplace. When politicians actually argue that a nation should go to war, we are already familiar with the terminology, and war does not seem like such a strange course of action.

Words have already pasted over the pain, already paved the path to destruction. After 9/11, the world was immediately told there was a "war" on terror, rather than an effort to prevent terror . The use of the word "war" was a subtle argument that what was necessary was military action rather than police action.

The phrase, "War on Terror" changed the course of history. Into the book of human history was written another chapter about bombs falling on children, the smoke and fire, the fear, the mothers of soldiers who will never come home, bands of vicious men taking advantage of the chaos to steal and kill, greedy spending on new weapons when disease and hunger pull millions into their graves, a new volcano of anger ready to erupt for generations.

All because politicians did not just want to prevent terrorism; they wanted a war. "Prevention" just did not sound tough enough.

My friends, if I leave you with one message today, let it be this: our words have consequences. The more we talk about the world in terms of violent conflict, the more we see the world in those terms.

The more we see the world in violent terms, the more violence we are likely to see in the world. And so, if we want to eliminate war itself from this earth, we must do our best to eliminate the words of war from our vocabulary. We must confront the forces of war within individual words as well.

For instance, in both English and Árabic there is a struggle for the meaning of the word "jihad." While some might think of it only as a term of war, a mainstream interpretation among Islamic scholars is that it represents not a physical battle against the infidel, but a personal, spiritual struggle against the demons within. I wish everyone in the world were aware of this.

I wish everyone in the world were aware that the word "security" has been hijacked, that there is more to keeping human beings safe than protecting them from other human beings.

Taking back the word "security" means recognizing that the biggest killer in the world is heart disease, not Saddam Hussein. Taking back security means understanding that malaria is a mass-murderer, that AIDS is more ruthless than Al-Qaeda.

On September 11th, 2001, the United States lost 3000 lives because of Osama Bin Laden. That same year, the world lost over 1.6 million lives because of tuberculosis. And yet the United States spends roughly half a trillion dollars a year on its military, when only $7 billion would provide access to clean drinking water for the 1.6 billion people on the planet who do not have it.

If we all believed in a broader definition of security, a definition that included security against disease, security against hunger, security against a future impoverished of opportunity, then I do not think this perverse obsession with buying weapons would continue.

There is just one way to change these definitions: through our own hard work. We must think of new phrases compatible with peace and then use them. Let's not fight for things, let's work for them. Let's not "round up the troops," let's put together a team.

When we talk about security let us talk about public health, when we mention "special forces" let us mention Doctors Without Borders, when we speak of defense contractors let us speak of the Red Cross. In order to win a struggle over weapons we must first win a struggle over words.

If we start this hard work here, today, in Denver, at PeaceJam, it could be the beginning of a chain reaction, and who knows how far it will go. Global change truly can start from within. Now, I am sincerely interested to hear your thoughts and questions, on these subjects or any other. I know you have some good ones. So fire away. Wait, I mean, ask away.

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Just a background on Costa Rica ? it is a tropical country slightly smaller than SL but with one fifth the population of SL. It is democratic country with a long history of democracy. Has an executive president with two vice presidents.

When it became independent it was the poorest Spanish colony. Today it is still not a rich country but very peaceful and developing well. Has a per capita of $ 12,000 as against $ 5000 of SL. And most interestingly one of the very few countries in the world who does not have A military so therefore no money is spent on military.

And the current president is Nobel Peace prize recipient. And this is a country which's biggest export was Pineapples and then bananas a decade ago.

Now the biggest export is microchips, second Pineapples and the third Bananas ! And for population 4.6 million the number of tourists to the country is 1.5 million as against SL where population is 20 million and attracts 0.5 million tourists.