15 February 2022, El Espectador
On some pavements of Bogotá’s southern highway, they sell huge chunks of meat, offal hanging from itinerant hooks, splattered by the pollution of cars and the mud left by yesterday’s downpour. There are herbs for lovesickness, for the evil eye, for aching bones and ageing wombs. There are balls for the children and new and used flowers to take to the cemetery where the dead with sad pockets sleep.
It is a road full of buses, forbidden vixens, and transport trucks that seem to be heading for some ghost town.
Bogotá lives in the mountains, between blue skies and unpredictable storms. Like in Michelangelo’s film, one goes “From agony to ecstasy”. Displaced people, executives, tenements and heart surgeries; in one block the market with a dirt floor and around the corner a Ferrari, two pharmacies and a convent; tables with embroidered tablecloths and pilgrims knocked out by the sleeping pills of hunger; bohemian bars, art galleries, so much goodness and so much violence; red rags of misery and insatiable bankers. 8 million people; life is auctioned between courage and fear, between love and loneliness. And no one will take away this blessed illusion taught to overcome daily catastrophes.
When I was walking down the avenue, they commented on an interview that appeared in a weekly newspaper -which was excellent until it was destroyed by Uribism and bad journalism-. They asked “How much is it worth to look after an ex-FARC?” The question is miserable and the answer even worse, because of what it says and who says it: the high commissioner for peace. After the title, what follows is beyond belief. Word more word less, we should be grateful that only 303 ex-combatants who signed the peace agreement have been killed, while at the time, more than five thousand ex-paramilitaries were killed. Reading the string of accusations – which practically leave a target practice plate on the backs of the ex-guerrillas – one could conclude that the current government has done its best to protect their lives, but that’s up to them, if the criminals of the different gangs and insurgencies go on a killing spree. And the High Commissioner is not alone in his questionable stature. Something similar was said by the interior minister about the killings in Arauca: “Bandits executing bandits”.
The old west was an appetizer. Disposable lives. Endless wars. An eye for an eye, dead for dead, absence for absence.
(Pause. Breathe. The only thing sadder than the truth would be to ignore it. Please read in Cambio “El número 16”, a beautiful – and very sad – column by Jaime Honorio).
Let’s go back to the interview in the media whose name I don’t want to remember: The High Commissioner twice points out by name and surname a former FARC commander and repeats how much it costs to protect his life. He obviously omits to say that this same signatory of the Agreement has spent the last five years leading peace meetings, asking for forgiveness in every corner of Colombia and working for the reconciliation of this society, which is sick with ignorance and resentment.
Commissioner, you are very smiling in the photo and very poor in spirit. It is not so difficult to understand that life has infinite value, but it is priceless. We have a State Commitment – not charity or the choice of the government of the day – to the more than thirteen thousand men and women who have laid down their arms and who continue to make peace.
Once again, I see from the window the carts of the weed sellers… Slowly… perhaps they sell something for the soul’s inopia.
