The worst thing happening in Colombia, as so often happens, gets lost between the two loud utterances of the two extremes; but no one seems willing to mention it lest their distorted versions be derailed
On the one hand there is the children’s spectacle of our most elementary law, which today is so tainted with what is called Schadenfreude in German: satisfaction for the evil of others. On the other hand, the denial of so many deliberately blind leftists who are convinced that the Petro government is badly off because there is a gigantic conspiracy that has nothing to do with the president, with his behavior, with his decisions, with … has to do with the people you surround yourself with. On the one hand, the right wing, which during Duque’s mediocre government devoted itself to sabotaging the implementation of the Teatro Colón agreements, just as it had previously sabotaged the referendum; On the other hand, the left, for whom these agreements “remained incomplete”, as Petro said at the time, and whose answer is neither to complete them nor to try to do everything possible to apply them, but to create others that are more outdated, less studied and above all less responsible. On the one hand, the fanatical and obstructive Right, which barely hides its dissatisfaction with all these people taking power that they never had; on the other hand, the left with double standards, which tolerates or condones the same behaviors that it condemns when others do so.
In the midst of these two antagonistic positions, seeing not what is there but what they would like, Petro is celebrating his first year in office, disappointing many who were at neither extreme: those who were naïve who believed it possible to form another government after such a dirty and corrupt election campaign as usual. (Or those who refused to see filth and corruption, or those who justified it by arguing that the others always did. Which is both true and justifies nothing. And no: it’s not possible It is not possible to make another government by resorting to the same client lists, the same corrupts and the same influence dealers who have been running dirty Colombian politics for decades It is not possible to make another government with such dishonest campaigns to intimidate the opposition to defame bordering on slander, “burning” opponents with strategies similar to a particular right when burning in their own way, nor “following the ethical line,” the infamous expression of a responsible person, later fittingly used was rewarded, not without a treaty with the generous state, as has happened to so many, but with a consulate in a major capital.
Apparently another candidate was right: one governs when one comes to power. If you arrive with tricks, make concessions to the worst vices of our politics, or simply bend the rules out of the strange belief that the end justifies the means, you will sooner or later get the bill. This has happened over the last few months, with each scandal seeming to surpass the previous one while heralding an even worse scandal. I can’t remember who said about a bad time that you had to eat a live toad in the morning to make sure nothing worse happened to you the rest of the day. It’s not much different from what we sometimes feel in these times, because it’s not just about dealing with the indescribable chaos that surrounds Petro and doing so in the hope that the dignity of the institutions will not be damaged, but also about accepting the terrible revelations that are coming at us like ghosts from another time, thanks to the institutions timely created by the peace accords: the Truth Commission and the Special Justice for Peace.
After the last elections I wrote that Petro’s victory was the best thing that could happen to the country under the circumstances; I really thought so, albeit without joy, because the other candidate seemed and still seems to me like a catastrophe of ignorance, opportunism and frivolity, and moreover like a kind of empty container that our little bukelitos and bolsonaritos use at will would fill. But when a left-wing president forms alliances with homophobic and anti-abortion preachers (to get the influential voice of the same evangelical churches whose lies have also sabotaged the peace accords), or when he declares that he wants to fight corruption while the ruling elites who are known to put corrupt people in important positions (or people who only inspire trust in the corrupt), those of us who are less deceived may wonder if volunteering doesn’t prevent us from seeing reality with the clarity it deserves.
I have to say: the chaos didn’t surprise me, or rather, it surprised me by its scale, but not by its existence. Even during his tenure as mayor, Petro proved to be a man with great ideas, some very commendable and some even blatantly reasonable, but at the same time he was a lousy team manager, unable to execute and too doomed to be carried away by the darkest feelings of the ideology to see everything through the prism of messianism. Petro, such an unbearably strong man, can’t get the thought out of his head that the salvation of everything and everyone lies in his hands: “If I fail, the darkness will destroy everything,” he told this newspaper in a tone that very similar to that used by Uribe, another caudillo (or another messiah) to announce that he was ready to be re-elected a second time “only in the event of a catastrophe”.
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But what is happening now is a disruption of a different magnitude. The disorder is large and microscopic, affecting the general and the particular. The lack of control that Petro had over his electoral campaign is very serious, into which the worst interests and the crudest corruption have crept; but the delays, absences, transgressions and a thousand rudenesses with which the President not only obstructs his own agenda, but also interrupts the channels of dialogue and sends this unequivocal message, which is the same in the case of Supreme Court judges or the President of the United States the German Parliament: Out of disregard for good morals or out of disregard for the conventions of the elite or for whatever reason, the truth is that there is disorder here.
Now the country is in uncertainty, trying to guess what will happen to the scandal involving its corrupt son, who is not only the son of the President, but of his time: he belongs to the generations that did not avoid the harmful have influence from the drug trade, or its culture of quick and easy money, or its lack of natural antibodies to defend itself against pervasive corruption. And people everywhere are wondering if Petro knew or didn’t know and we’ll be engrossed in these discussions for months to come. And of course that’s important, but I’m not sure if it’s the most important thing or it’s important in the long run. In addition to the instability that comes from within, from the bowels of a palace and a family, there is that created by outsiders. But we will all wake up and the chaos will still be there. And that’s the worst.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a writer
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