High altitudes are characterised by a marked lack of oxygen.
The world is upside down. Not only as a product of the events provoked by climate change or the absurd and irresponsible way of destroying what has been placed in our care. Simply because of the loss of sanity of the overwhelming majority of rulers, politicians and businessmen whose sole aim in life is to accumulate power, wealth and manoeuvrability for it to make other nations a haven for their corrupt acts. When we point to the puppets of our failing countries, we must not forget who is pulling the strings. As a consequence of this short-sightedness, valuable opportunities to reinforce human values and those of utopian democracies are lost.
The airs and graces of the heights cause a loss of sense of reality, hallucinations, a sense of invulnerability and a complete detachment from the consequences of actions. This syndrome is well known to politicians, billionaires and, of course, mountaineers – although the latter come to their senses as soon as they come down from the summits – and its effects have an impact on decisions capable of changing the course of history. This happens in such abundance in the upper circles of power that, when some of these potentates act intelligently, they seem like heroes of legend.
The wretched rulers of Central America’s northern triangle, plus Nicaragua, are, for the moment and for the rest of Latin America, a painful example of this loss of human capacity. They have not only taken over all the institutions created to protect democratic values and laws; they have also transformed themselves into despots with pretensions of absolute power to guarantee impunity for their crimes against humanity, for their economic crimes, for their obvious incapacity and, incidentally, to create an insurmountable barrier against efforts to contain corruption.
Although this is the local example of mismanagement and perverse intentions, on other continents too, ambitions for power compete for the top places in their quest for geopolitical control of the planet, no matter how many innocent lives are annihilated in the wake of their troops, missiles and indecent negotiations to maintain economic control. To this end, high-level global institutions are created as instruments of coercion, the nature of which is beyond any kind of control, including the many treaties and conventions signed to uphold human and nature’s rights.
Perhaps because of this atmosphere of chaos, the incidences of which monopolise the attention of huge business conglomerates to which the world’s largest media entities belong, we tiny citizens – those of us who populate the least developed countries – will never have an accurate picture of how global politics work and why no power cares about our insignificant destiny.
Speeches about freedom and democracy die a natural death as soon as they touch our borders and become empty words in the face of the provocations of the world’s most corrupt rulers. The only protection mechanism is, therefore, in the hands of starving peoples, condemned to ignorance and subjected to constant abuse by their governments; and it is these, too, who receive the hardest blows from the system that governs us.
Absolute control of power is capable of destroying the entire legal scaffolding that protects us.
