Make green tea on the stove in an American kitchen. The apartment rises above some old trees. The morning is clear, bright. The living room of the house is divided into two rooms. One faces the street windows, with a sofa and a fireplace that hasn’t been used for a long time. The other is his office with a desk and a stationary bike. Presenter Marta Ruiz, one of the most respected analysts of Colombian news, appears to have reached a breaking point in her life at 57 years old. At the end of his time as a member of the truth commission, an immersion in the country’s violence, he wonders what comes next, what comes next.
“You experience moments of existential crisis throughout your life,” he says as he pours panela into the teapot. I am in a moment of transition, of change. And you ask yourself: Where am I going? Have I done something useful? What’s left for me? Why did I come here? The good thing is that you learn to live with imperfection. Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian neuroscientist, has this text about the theory of imperfection and she says something beautiful: Imperfection is what moves us forward. What activates us, what makes us constantly struggle to overcome something.
Her house is perfectly organized, but in her opinion that is only on the surface: “There are people who are anarchic, like me. And we tend to be unhappier.”
Ruiz – journalist and author of the book “This City Doesn’t Love Me” – writes a weekly article in La Silla Vacía.
Marta Ruiz looks for a cup to serve tea. Diego Cuevas
Questions. His mother was a neighborhood hairdresser.
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Answer. I grew up in a neighborhood that later became famous for its violence. It is called San Javier and is located in municipality 13 of Medellín. My mother had another job, but when she arrived in the evening, she opened the hair salon at home. The good thing about a hair salon is that the whole neighborhood comes by, you know the world. We saw how the drug trade took off. Next to where we lived there was a place called “Stable” where the drug dealers went riding Paso horses. The drug trade permeated the youth. The boys went from using marijuana to using cocaine. The problem of gangs paradoxically emerged in the context of a peace process. The M-19 – the guerrilla in which Gustavo Petro served – began talks with the government of Belisario Betancur and when it agreed to a ceasefire, peace camps were set up in the cities. It happened in Medellín, Bogotá, California. Many boys were recruited and trained militarily. These boys had no political intention and very quickly they became involved in the drug trade and turned into a greed for weapons and money. You killed for a pair of tennis shoes.
Q There is a gap in his life, I never heard him talk about his father.
R. It’s just that he wasn’t there, he left when I was a child. I looked for him when I was 33, when he had another family and other children. Since then we have had a good relationship, but more as friends than anything else.
Q How has this abandonment shaped you?
R. It definitely had a big impact on the rest of my life. It gives you a feeling of helplessness. In Colombia, the story of parents abandoning their children is very common. We have dysfunctional families and those gaps are filled by others. In my case, the extended family: I had five uncles who were very present in my life.
Q These people hung portraits of Mao, Marx and Engels in the bedroom.
R. My uncles were militants of the MOIR (Independent and Revolutionary Workers’ Movement), a Maoist left that never took up arms. These movements had many connections to Beijing and the revolution. Such texts were read at home. But I never liked MOIR, they seemed very pamphlet-like to me.
Q They became involved in other, more radical movements.
R. I spent two years in secret and was very radical, although very theoretical, without taking any action. We had the idea that there was a very big repression. We saw the army on the streets, there were missing people, torture. In the end I ended up in the ELN.
Q He believed in armed struggle.
R. At this moment, yes. What influenced me the most was the revolution in Nicaragua. There were a lot of emotions. There was a whole cultural movement around the revolution. We inherited all the literature from the Southern Cone, from Eduardo Galeano, from Mario Benedetti, that fed our dreams. I think I have a very Latin American and anti-imperialist core structure.
Q Then he went up the mountain.
R. I was in urban guerrilla groups and when I met León Valencia (analyst, political scientist, writer) we left.
Q He says he came back from there a different person.
R. There I learned the futility of war. I understood that the guerrillas were deeply isolated and far removed from reality. The country was very separated from what was happening in the city. I didn’t see clearly how a revolution could be made with what we were doing. When I got up in the morning, I asked myself if what I was doing would cause a revolution, and my answer was no. I didn’t see that we did anything important. I have not seen a people raised in arms. They were people who voluntarily wanted to take on the task of raising the consciousness of each individual to spread a spark throughout the prairie, but it didn’t work. Colombia has never been on the brink of revolution.
Marta Ruiz, in her home in Bogotá. Diego Cuevas
Q She was embarrassed for a while when someone told her she had been a guerrilla.
R. I tried to reconcile with the person I was. Are you really willing to kill for something? I’m sorry I picked up the gun, that seems silly. There were other options, and the people who really did the most to transform this country didn’t do it with guns. The big changes are due to people who approached the war from a different ethical and political perspective.
R. He forgot the past and started all over again at 30. How do you do that?
R. City in transition. The first person who gave me a job without knowing me was Ramón Jimeno (writer, journalist, screenwriter), without me having any experience. Then Maria Jimena Duzán. I started working on human stories, of countries and characters. I remember a good story about a boxer who went blind because a beer can was thrown at his forehead by a stand. Then he became a coach. It was very late, around 2003, when I started reporting on the conflict. Uribe’s entire government touched me. If you do journalism in Colombia, you will be swept along by the currents of conflict.
Q What mark will Uribe leave in history?
R. Uribe will go down in history more for his mistakes than his successes. Uribe was the answer to a moment in the country. It wasn’t about him imposing himself, but about him interpreting the country. But I think he couldn’t understand that Colombia is no longer like him, it was left behind. The country also begins to look at the war with shame and as if it were not something heroic but something tragic. I think Uribe still feels like a war hero. A very high legacy of corruption also awaits him.
Q In recent years, as Commissioner of the Truth Commission, she has faced the deepest violence in this country. How was this experience?
R. I delved into the war because I have a thing for delving into things to the point of almost destroying myself. There are no limits to my commitment. I have covered the conflict as a journalist for 15 years and wanted to piece together all the fragments to understand it better. Journalists are used to hearing very different versions of things. In general, we are very epidermal and need to delve deeper into people and their motivations. So going through the commission was a multi-dimensional experience, I entered the conflict from many sides, such as rational, historical, social, political, but above all human insight. It meant feeling the heart of war beating with all its pain and all its evil. It was a carnal approach, not about examining something with coldness and distance. We went into the mud to dig.
Q How will it be read in the future?
R. We had a lot of discussions about this. As a journalist, I wanted a report that would be read today. In general, my colleagues aimed for a report that would be read in the future. The report is undoubtedly very valuable, but I believe that what the Commission leaves behind is not so much the report, because ultimately a lot has been written about the conflict in Colombia. We had a great conversation about the wound, he allowed us to reach out and touch it. It contributed to a healing process. The truth is changing this country. The commission made truth a value. Colombia must lose its fear of the truth. The fear is great because the truth is disturbing. Truth breaks the status quo based on beliefs that are not necessarily true. What is needed above all is a healing truth.
Q He worked hand in hand with Francisco de Roux, priest and philosopher.
R. Pacho is a very educated person. I don’t think anyone knows Colombia better than him, who has thought about it so much.
Q A kind of saint.
R. More of a wise man. He has a wisdom that is far from any intellectual model, he has what is necessary: the ability to hurt with others. The wisdom to keep hope alive in people. The wisdom of being able to be a bridge between visions, but also of having the character to, above all, speak the truth in order to rebuild ourselves. The most valuable thing about Pacho is that he is human. And from there he brings in all his sociological, theological and economic knowledge. It stands where no one else in Colombia stands, namely in people.
Marta Ruiz, October 4, 2023. Diego Cuevas
Q Let’s talk about the Gustavo Petro mystery. Who is the president?
R. It’s hard to read. Firstly, he is a great fighter, a man who inspires a lot and makes you dream about the future. He is a leader, but at the same time he is someone who is inscrutable. His personality is indecipherable. There is a silent part of him, repressed. He is also a visionary leader, but not a strategist. He needs strategists at his side and he doesn’t have them. At the same time, it is the great opportunity that this country has. I have never seen such an opportunity in my life. We pray to the gods that he is well and that he achieves what he proposes. If he succeeds, this country will change forever. He is the right president for this historic moment.
Q What are you worried about?
R. I’m worried that Petro is living mirages. For example, if you feel that filling the Plaza de Bolívar means people’s support. He needs to strongly revitalize his relationships with society. It has to unite the country. This country is broken inside. It’s not a lie that we’re at the base of the volcano, it’s straight up broken. Changes need to be made, but a strategy is needed to achieve greater consensus. Without that it is difficult because this country has a very big wound in its heart. It slips into violence very easily.
Q Petro’s project is so ambitious that it can hardly be achieved in four years. Will the continuation only be successful if you manage to find someone you trust to be your successor?
R. The Latin American experience has shown us that appointing a successor is not a guarantee. Look at Ecuador, we just saw it. The national agreement seems to be more important to me. Let’s reach an agreement around a few axes. The national agreement is the future of the country, it would guarantee that whoever the government is must adhere to some basics. But there is something important: this agreement is political. What happened in Havana (the peace agreement between the extinct FARC and the government of Juan Manuel Santos)? Everything was legalized. And Petro, like a good Colombian, believes that the laws will change the country. We need to reach an agreement on the basic survival of the nation for 30, 40, 50 years. There are areas that are simply not part of the nation, they are in the hands of pirates. There is no rule of law, no democracy. Dictatorships of criminal groups rule. The basic peace agreement is to integrate these areas into a supposed democracy like the one we live here in Bogotá.
Q Do you think the ELN is ready to reach an agreement with the Petro government?
R. Now it’s time to ripen them like avocados with newspaper. Half of a guerrilla’s and even a government’s desire for peace comes from the table. The ELN is not mature, the ELN is maturing in the process. You can already feel the changes, from the way they came to the way they will go. Are others. This also happens to the government. The Santos government said in Havana that these were negotiations over months, not years; It took five years. Everyone changes along the way and that’s the brilliant and beautiful thing. Just as the national dialogue, when there is someone to lead it, will change us all. Politics is in a deep crisis and it is therefore very difficult to change a country. There is no leadership, there is no one on the right.
Q Could it be José Félix Lafaurie, the president of the ranchers?
R. I see him as a leader.
Q And a possible candidate?
R. It’s for the right sector.
Q Wouldn’t he be at odds with his wife, María Fernanda Cabal?
R. Not necessarily. For me it would not be surprising that she collects the most radical part, the most oppositional part, Uribism, and then hands it over to an articulate campaign that he leads. In other words: I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she already works for him. José Félix has a lot of energy, a lot of knowledge, he is ideologically very solid, he is a respectable guy. In general, he tends to be sincere. He has all the shortcomings of the politicians and the elites of this country, all of them, but I think that in general he is very courageous in the sense that he takes part in the dialogue (he is a negotiator with the ELN) and that he lies within the framework this national agreement. He also changed along the way.
Q He doesn’t like it when the media is in the hands of bankers.
R. It’s a global problem. Power in Colombia is promiscuous. There is a strong coexistence between economic and political power. Power is heavily concentrated in a few families or companies and this power is abusive. I don’t like that the media is in the hands of those who commit this abuse of power.
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