8 March 2022. The Spectator
My vote is not secret. Humberto de la Calle led the two political realities with the greatest positive impact in the last 100 years in Colombia: The Constituent Assembly of 1991 and the Peace Agreement with the FARC, two socio-political undertakings that could have been leaps into the void and that De la Calle removed them.
Last Friday, Granada – a town in Antioquia that has suffered through all the wars – paid De la Calle a tribute of gratitude. “Don Humberto, thanks to your work in Havana, we were finally able to sleep without the sound of bullets whizzing past our heads”. “When we are together hoeing together, there is no more rancour or enemies”. With 97% of its population displaced, Grenada has dedicated itself since the signing of the Accord to rebuilding the homes and souls of the people. In the Salón del Nunca Más are the faces of men, women and children who disappeared; letters from a girl to her father, devoured by the fighting; a piece of explosive, a door to peace, texts of forgiveness without forgetting; sad land recovered from a grave where we could have been. The Agreement allowed them to begin again and the children of war will now be the fathers of peace.
De la Calle got half the country to change the deafening cry of violence for the voice of conciliation and now we need him to legislate for this disjointed Colombia. From the Senate he will demand the true implementation of the Peace Accord and proposes to reform the police, justice and politics, settle social debts, defend the environment and autonomy in the most difficult decisions of the life cycle. He is our only living statesman, the dean who exercises humanism and moves with talent and spontaneity in the country of the yellow butterflies and in the international context. He exercises politics and life with a fascinating blend of lucidity, virtue and defiance of convention. He knows that no fire can be put out with hatred and gasoline. That is why I will vote for De la Calle for the Senate, #1, Coalición Centro Esperanza.
For the House my vote is for Gabriel Cifuentes #103, Alianza Verde. Columnist, uniandino lawyer with masters and doctorate degrees from Harvard, New York and Rome, he has peace tattooed in his genes and in his behaviour. I have great confidence in Gabriel. He is an extraordinary human being who thinks in profundity about the armed conflict, transitional justice and reconciliation. He has ethical and intellectual transparency and has never been and never will be indifferent to the lives and deaths of social leaders and ex-combatants.
Participatory democracy must defeat the regime exercised during these almost four years co-opted by massacres, by the dictatorship of fear and the inability to govern.
We need a strong and visionary peace caucus: that Humberto de la Calle is elected with a large vote; that Iván Cepeda, the congressman of unlimited courage, the defender of peace and human rights whom nothing and no one can bend, remains in the Senate; that new people in politics, such as Gabriel Cifuentes and Diana Rodríguez, a strong and untainted woman, committed to issues of citizen security, gender and comprehensive rural reform, reach the Chamber of Deputies.
What we have experienced and what has been buried since 7 August 2018 obliges us to emerge from this fog between regression, paralysis and the advancement of democracy. I invite you to demonstrate that politics is not the patrimony of the parties and that reason and the opinion vote can do more than the hairy hand of the electoral barons, sponsors of corruption and discredit.
