A police officer fires tear gas at protesters during the strike against the tax reform in Cali.Andrés González / AP
In the midst of the protest, the degradation of it, the human rights violations, the withdrawal of the tax reform appears that overflowed the cup of indignation in Colombia and the search for a route for consensus, agreements, and the spaces to listen. There can be no other way for now, in addition to finding within the many proposals that have been made, a sensible technical text that allows to solve the main economic needs that the country is going through. But that's not the bottom line. And the fund needs to be made visible or otherwise, like the violence that is recycled, the outbreak will not stop.
"That we are good people," said President Iván Duque in an address on the seventh day of protests in Colombia, when many cities are without communication with each other, short of food and oxygen, due to the blockades of the outraged from various sectors.
It is not easy to know what he means.
Well, the so-called good people recognize their faults, punish those who violate the rights of others and do not applaud them.
More information
The fault is not of the others
Between the box and the trust
I go in parts, because in this sea of violence on both sides, there are several explanations for what is happening to us and consequences. One of those is that uribism is at the forefront of its last hours. The blow to its permanence in the electoral scene is being given by the street. The President of the Republic does not believe that it is good people, who are hungry or in need, who are speaking to them, but a violence that is shielded by political justifications, without saying who they are, because their sentences are incomplete or because they are afraid to point out guilty because he does not even know who the violent ones he is referring to are. And if you know, you prefer to speak from the sides and not from the front.
And it is important to say that he is wrong, because the true solutions depend on his approximation. The protest is against his government and is a collection of accounts simmered before the decision to circumvent territorial peace, before the speech of the Democratic Center of Confrontation, of that party that denies the victims of past and present violence, and that has made a political construction to always avoid the distribution of the land, which its backers could not even keep, because now it is under the control of other criminal drug trafficking gangs.
And that is why his political discourse tries to put in the same network, in the same bag, anarchists and violent groups with taxi drivers, merchants, students or truck drivers, those yes good people. Differentiating the motives would imply recognizing that this new protest was born after the murder of Javier Ordóñez last September by a police officer, and that the reform of the institution was not carried out. It is to recognize that there is no government or conscience to understand that they came to govern a country that was in deep bankruptcy, after the peace agreement with the FARC and needed greater leadership to heal the wounds.
The IACHR has made it clear what are the international obligations of the state regarding internal security and inter-American standards that provide for the tasks of the armed forces. It must be extraordinary, regulated, supervised and subordinate. It is no less than the United Nations, the State Department, the US congressmen and the European Union, in a single day express themselves on what they have described as brutal and excessive in handling the protest. Precisely because there is a term called proportionality, which should be clear to the authorities called upon to respond from the institutionality.
And why is it important to put the dots on the i's at this time? Because if from the newsrooms, which are now our homes due to the pandemic, we are dedicated to reporting young people killed by police officers, without discovering the faces and identities of human rights violators, we will have done nothing.
If we are not able to also say that in the violence with long weapons there is an amalgam of looters, ELN militias, and of the dissidents and other crimes of arms trafficking and drug trafficking, but we do not demand that those who denounce it, the evidence , we are feeding the defense minister's narrative, according to which it is all a criminal political plot. What is up to us is to question him about the abuses of the men in his charge, and the reasons why these crimes are capable of destabilizing everything without the forces of order being able to prevent it.
The voices that offer to serve in times of crisis, many of which also contributed to it, are not understanding that Colombia has a very complex reality at this time, a result, as I heard from the journalist María Alejandra Villamizar, “from a make-up democracy in a country that, like many others in Latin America, does not give a real answer to the problems of the people, where little politics is done, real politics ”. It is nothing but looking at El Salvador by Nayib Bukele.
And if the message has not been understood by Uribism, which also in its most radical bases ended up not surrounding their own president and revealing their disabilities, Congress and its little work for the people with few exceptions, and the courts co-opted by The governments of the day, and the political parties including Colombia Humana and its new permissiveness to clientelism, those of Radical Change, the liberals and all the various nuances, will have to understand that the country is set on fire by all of them, too.
Those spaces announced by Iván Duque to listen to citizens are an abstract scenario, if not with social organizations, with social leaders. And that starts from recognizing them as interlocutors, as good people. It cannot continue to offer a country with a future, if it is not able to recognize the past, the conflict, and if it does not leave its autistic present, because what is certain is that at least for Uribismo, the opportunities in Colombia they finished. Neither can the parties of the so-called Coalition of Hope, condition the dialogues when a minimum of humanitarian agreements must come out of them so that oxygen reaches the hospitals where almost 500 Colombians continue to die of Covid every day. It is not a time for conditions or deadlines.
Do not ask us for more indifference.
It is you, the government, who must achieve calm, while we investigate why the inaction of the State, who are the vandals, who is served by what is happening, how we can respond with the truth to information that serves the people in the midst of this homeland pain.
Subscribe here to the
EL PAÍS América
newsletter
and receive all the information keys on the region's current affairs