Even in a remote village in Sweden, people cannot escape the violence. In every village in the world, ordinary people are victims of crime. What answer do the Swedes give you? They have a police force that responds and defends the villagers against the violent.
If you do not defend them effectively and the criminals prevail against the local police, they will eventually take over the city, impose their arbitrary will, engage in illegal business and soon expand their activities to the next city.
This was the plot of many films. A classic I remember, The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954), which we saw at the District Cinematheque during the time of the university intellectuals. Or his version of the western “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) with Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen. Or the recent remake of the same name (2016) and without a memorable actor. Or the children’s version, Kung Fu Panda (2008), which fell into our hands as parents and we watched it a thousand times, which we didn’t do with Japanese or Western films.
These films tell the same story. A small village is devastated by a gang of criminals. The humble villagers call a group of armed men or martial arts experts to defend them, as there are no police and law enforcement agencies that effective in Sweden. This group comes and trains the villagers in basic battle tactics. The criminals finally attack and are victoriously repelled by the villagers and their defenders. Law and order prevail again. In the end they get someone who will defend them stably. In Kung Fu, Panda, Po and the legendary warriors are the epitome of the police.
They will say that these examples advocate paramilitarism. That’s not the case. They are pleading for someone, the police, the army, the navy or the air force, to respond and defend the villagers devastated by crime and violence. This is what China, Japan, the United States and Sweden did continually and tirelessly until civilization triumphed over barbarism.
In each case, it began with the recognition that there was an endemic problem of violence afflicting a clearly defined place in geography. In Sweden, Japan, China and the Far West, villagers had to find their own ways to protect themselves until someone came to their aid. It is happening in Colombia, where for decades we have abandoned hundreds of communities to their fate, ravaged by criminals of all stripes. They steal the children of farming families to turn them into militiamen, guerrillas or paramilitaries.
This type of slavery, which is as vile and reprehensible as that which has been practiced against Africans for centuries, has been referred to in Colombia by the euphemism of forced conscription. Could it be that one of the FARC, ELN or Paracos guerrilla groups that exist in Colombia would describe the forced conscription that brought African residents in chains to these countries as slavery?
Furthermore, after stealing the children, these groups of guerrillas and paramilitaries return to the villages to murder their parents on the callous grounds that they are helping the other side. In addition, they force or persuade them to grow coca and then turn them into scrapers. In our villages, human abuse has exceeded levels experienced in Sweden, China, Japan, and the American Far West.
Today, exploitation is linked to coca. But today’s plantations and laboratories have almost identical predecessors 100 years ago, namely the rubber plantations of Putumayo, which José Eustasio Rivera denounced in the novel “La vorágine”.
Fundamental scrutiny seems to have escaped our political, military and police leaders, who have known for decades where the frequency of abnormal crimes lie and have seen them happen day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
The only words that currently seem appropriate to address the problem are: peace. It would seem that talking politically about peace, passing laws for peace, sitting down to negotiate for peace, making concessions for peace, and chatting about peace left and right would be enough.
Meanwhile, the villagers of our provinces continue to face the bloodiest and cruelest wars. War that they only dare to wage timidly and sporadically, with them and for them. And that always ends before you have defeated the criminals and violent people. Or, even worse, that it is perverted and corrupted in pathetical and unimaginable ways in the form of false positives.
The incidence of violence in Colombia coincides with the location of coca cultivation and cocaine routes. Four departments concentrate three quarters of coca leaf production: Nariño, Cauca, Putumayo and Norte de Santander. There our armed forces, police and judicial system had to move urgently, violently and permanently to enforce the constitution for the villagers; instead of devoting ourselves to changing the laws and constitution to benefit criminals.
Winston Churchill, as was his wont, summed it up in a succinct formula: “One must choose between war and disgrace. If you choose disgrace, you will have war.” The politicians and the armed forces chose disgrace. However, that didn’t stop them from getting into a war. And in the end they will lose it.
Now complete peace is one of those delusional brainchildren of our politicians who believe that semantics determine reality. I am convinced that the true basis of peace lies in the willingness to fight a war and, when it comes to it, the ability to win it.
Avoiding war with the argument that the only way out is to negotiate with criminals because you cannot or do not want to defeat them condemns violence, cruelty, forgetfulness and complete apathy.
Several films have been made about the violence in our village, all harsh and demoralizing. We must put into action the resolute defense of our villagers. The Swedes decided to make it, as did the Chinese, the Japanese and the Americans. Up until now, this task has remained a major challenge for us. It is time we wage a noble war, the only lasting support for the peace these civilized nations enjoy.
Let us conclude with José Ortega y Gasset: “I am very sorry that I do not agree with contemporary pacifism in its aversion to violence; Without them, there would be nothing in the past that means the most to us, and if we exclude them from the future, we can only imagine a chaotic humanity… The state of eternal war in which savage peoples live is exactly this “None of them is capable of forming an army and therefore a respectable, respected national organization.”
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