Latin America, which has never been alien to violence, these days has begun to talk about violence like never before. The assassination of candidate Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador gave us a feeling, unprecedented for Ecuadorians and already forgotten by many others, of witnessing humiliation (the symptom of humiliation) without turning back. It was immediately clear that Ecuador was experiencing its own talk-in-the-cathedral moment: when, like Santiago Zavala on the first page of the novel, you ask when our country was screwed. And we Colombians began to remember the many assassinations that have marked our history, but one in particular: that of Luis Carlos Galán, who was publicly shot dead on August 18, 1989. He had only just reached the wooden platform where he was about to deliver his candidate speech in Soacha when the shots rang out, his body fell and those around him threw themselves to the ground, and those brief seconds opened a gap in Colombian history, from which we have not yet recovered.
The assassination of Galán, who would have become president if he had not been killed, bears many similarities to the assassination of Villavicencio and I’m sure I’m not the first to notice them. But two are more shocking than the others: First, the two deaths were announced deaths, as the two candidates faced the same powerful enemy: the drug mafias. Both had denounced threats in their own name, both knew who wanted to kill them, both had said they would neither back down nor continue the pursuit of their pursuers. The second similarity is more circumstantial, but deep down it has a profound meaning: the two crimes were seen on video. That was rare at the time of Galán’s crimes, in those strange times when people didn’t go around with a device in hand and as spectators of their own lives recorded everything instead of living it; But now it surprises no one that a moment of transformation has been recorded forever and can be seen and relived immediately. We’ve grown accustomed to this aspect of our time, and it feels quite exotic to learn that something important happened – a murder, a rape, a scandal – and find out we can’t watch it on YouTube right now.
Video shows the moment the assassins shoot Villavicencio dead. We don’t see him fall like we saw Galán that night at 8:45 p.m., but the phone he’s recording does fall and the screams are heard and the world trembles, and the Ecuadorians – not just them Victim’s Relatives – You will refer to these images in the future to remember one of the moments that changed the country. We Colombians continue to do this, or at least those of us who have the crazy habit of continuing to contemplate the violence of the past: the murders of Galán, Pizarro, Bernardo Jaramillo or Álvaro Gómez are part of my fantasy generation. Like Gaitáns, it was part of the imagination of my grandparents’ generation. It says a lot about a country that generations are born and die without ending political violence. The simple fact that every generation has its dead and murdered, and that crime continues to go unpunished, at least up to a point, says a lot. There are no longer any people who witnessed the assassination of Rafael Uribe Uribe, but there are those who were not only alive but also present on April 9, 1948. They will also die and the living memory of Gaitán’s crimes will disappear and so on will be lost with it. .
A few weeks ago, the W conducted a poll that yielded an unfortunate result: a large percentage of young Colombians confused Gaitán with Galán. I think Enrique Santos commented on it in his Cambio column, as did Alberto Casas: the two men of a generation who had begun to live when Gaitán was murdered and who continue to live with (or perhaps in) the direct consequences of the crime lived . Like us, born in the early 1970s, we witnessed the world blown up by the assassination of Galán: Four years later, Pablo Escobar died, the most visible or famous killer of a decade of unbridled violence that not only killed tens of thousands of people killed of lives but imposed a whole way of looking at the world that still reigns among us. I’m afraid young people won’t mistake him for anyone, for Escobar is directly or indirectly involved in the frivolous series that fill their screens, and the shirts his son pays for his life with, and the cult enjoyed by the disoriented and the fools of the whole world. Moreover, what we call narcoculture has won: it has won its table of values, it has won its priorities, it has won its hideous aesthetic. And you have to be very blind not to give in to the evidence.
Halfway between the mess of drug culture and the violence that drug trafficking has always spawned — or a puritanical prohibitionism of the kind that used to try to protect Americans from alcohol and only succeeded in inventing the mafia — lie these Assassins that belong to the legacy of the 80’s. There have always been killers in our violent countries, and our ability to kill one another has always been a matter of diligence, but the hitman phenomenon is something else: And you must not have read We Wasn’t Born to Do It, Alonso Understand Salazar’s shocking investigation to know what I mean. The murder of Villavicencio in Ecuador should also lead us to certain questions about the disintegration of this society, which no longer just manufactures killers for its domestic violence. Six Colombians were arrested after the crime in Ecuador, just as before for the crime against the Paraguayan prosecutor (an exported or cross-border crime, if you will, although it happened on the Colombian coast) and before that against President Jovenel Moïse in Haiti. Three dead who were chasing the drug dealers.
It’s hard not to see them all as offshoots of a general decomposition that began four decades ago; On the other hand, it’s hard not to believe that it’s all a result of stupid prohibitionism that continues to believe it’s fighting drugs, while strengthening the drug trafficking mafia year after year. Every death in this absurd war is evidence of its failure, not because it would be impossible to protect citizens from such extreme and powerful violence, but because the killers are at least in part the creation or invention of the system that pursues them : For there to be killers, there must be mafias, and for there to be mafias, there must be a ban. In other words, the number of victims continues to fall because they are being pursued by violent mafias; but they go after mafias that didn’t exist before the ban; and Prohibition is an invention supposedly designed to protect people from harmful substances. Everything is absurd. Everything could be avoided. But nobody seems ready to have this difficult conversation seriously. And the decay continues in Latin America.
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