Gustavo Pedro together with Fico Gutiérrez during a presidential debate YURI CORTEZ (AFP)
Chronicle of a Latin American Subversive is the title of a film by Mauricio Walerstein (1945-2016), a Venezuelan filmmaker of Mexican origin who, in the second half of the 1970s, began to take an interest in certain testimony literature of the time that was successful in your adopted country.
It tells the melodrama of an urban guerrilla cell that kidnaps a US military attache in Caracas. In return for the gringo colonel’s life, the urban guerrillas are demanding that the death sentence imposed on a Vietcong guerrilla by a military court in former South Vietnam be overturned. Based on a real event that has transpired over the last decade, the film tritely draws on the forced coexistence of the gringo colonel and his captors.
The dialogues between the guerrilla and the gringo colonel – played by the great Claudio Brook – blaming each other for the injustices of the Cold War are certainly not the best thing about the remembered Mauricio’s film; Their triumph lies elsewhere: it’s the loose way of telling how the Communist Party’s Politburo, which has decided to abandon armed struggle for mass struggle and is in the process of pacifying the guerrilla cell, totally disregards the guerrilla cell.
__I borrowed a blindfolded and handcuffed gringo colonel for the weekend in an apartment, the entire army is scouring the city, and you’re just telling me that there are neither objective nor subjective conditions for an armed propaganda action? – The enraged commander of the cell complains to the office contact, who transmits the order to release the soldier. The room – in those days even the cinema was a room in the dark – bursts out in laughter.
The Castro-inspired guerrillas of the 1960s were defeated in Venezuela, and some of their former commanders, after serving prison sentences or returning from exile, wrote and published their version of what happened when they took up arms. Then Mauricio drew his argument.
Most of the former commanders blamed the failure on the political leadership and were reluctant to “reinvent” themselves as social democrats, progressive reformers. However, very few reverted to armed struggle in which more than one lost their life. An even smaller handful eventually became imbued with an all-purpose cynicism that passed for the disillusioned wisdom of an old soldier. From this last group came the Chávez ministers who ended up looting the state oil company and bankrupting the country.
Not all of these men and women were fanatics or mean people or sold their souls. Américo Martín, a former far-left guerrilla fighter who died in national esteem last February at the age of 84, has become a pre-eminent voice for the liberal idea in our America.
Martín, a great reader when discussing the political fortunes of commanders, humorously paraphrased F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase: “In Latin America there are no second acts for ex-guerrillas.” I wonder what he would say today, given that Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter, would become the first directly elected leftist president in two hundred and eleven years of Colombian history.
This fact alone, the successful metamorphosis from guerrilla fighter to constitutional president of a country with 50 million inhabitants, would give a Petro victory an epochal character, to use the suggestive expression of the historians of L’École des Annales.
I first came to Colombia in 1991, just in time to see the proclamation of the constitution signed simultaneously by a liberal political drummer, a staunch conservative and a former commander of the M-19, Petro’s combat partner.
I am, as my dear friend Carlos Franz and I one day agreed to define ourselves politically, a sort of centre-left liberal, a legacy of Teodoro Petkoff’s ideas, and I congratulate myself on having chosen Bogotá as my place of exile. I’ve witnessed four election campaigns here. See how the one from Ciénaga de Oro fights and defeats all the great white hopes of the Colombian right! For me, it will be like watching Muhammad Ali fight the Battle of Kinshasha from the ring in 1974.
Therefore, for August 8th, I will suspend the authoritarian temptation warnings that Gustavo Petro and my Venezuelans have good reason to warn about their zombie ideas in oil matters.
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