A protester with the Colombian flag protests over a bus station in the city of Bogotá. DPA via Europa Press / Europa Press
Another week has passed and we seem to be living the same day and the same hours over and over again amidst uncertainty, chaos, and blockages.
Those who are called to lead the exits resign favoring their personal interests as did the High Commissioner of La Paz, Miguel Ceballos, to launch themselves in the midst of failure as a candidate for the Presidency, which could be interpreted as mystical madness plus the blindness of power.
He argued that he had resigned since December to leave in May and yet accepted the position of mediator with the representatives of the protest.
Without being able to process the differences, he now appears on social networks with an electoral campaign under the slogan TU, Transformación y Unión, when his departure only proves that the division in the governing party is growing more and more.
He was replaced by Emilio Archila for the so-called social dialogue;
The illusion of a new dialogue was quickly diluted when at the first meeting of the renewed leadership the members of the government and the strike committee rose from the table, without being able to sign a minimum preliminary agreement of guarantees to find a route towards solutions. structural demands demanded by the protests, which have already been in Colombia for a month.
And while in Bogotá the installation of the negotiating table failed, in the Pacific, in Buenaventura, the Vice Minister of the Interior and the Vice Minister of Agriculture and the new Minister of Peace, signed an agreement that validated anarchy and gave the protesters the power to review and authorize the loads that enter and leave the most important port in the country. The incoherence within the government was exposed by former President Álvaro Uribe and former Vice President German Vargas Lleras, who trilled indignantly causing the disavowal of what was signed.
The government of Iván Duque insists that it only signs a pre-agreement of guarantees to the protest if they lift the blockades that have several regions short of supplies, cause losses of 15 billion pesos and have bankrupted hundreds of companies, they have dammed 602 thousand tons of food, lost almost a million jobs in the field, figures that were not even left by the pandemic.
The strike committee, for its part, is not even capable of recriminating those who block, as if that would make them more respectable, without seeing that they will end up being responsible for the wounded and dead and for the bankruptcies. From victims of unemployment and poverty they pass to the side of the perpetrators. Does the government play at that wear and tear and chaos in which the authorities do not appear, as when the vandals set fire to the Tuluá Palace of Justice? It's possible. But the cost is very high, today there is no government for citizens. Some already analyze whether the president has the Dunning Kruger Effect, the cognitive bias under which individuals tend to overestimate their ability. The bias of the illusory superiority that I left raised in an interview that I had the opportunity to do with him for the book 'Iván Duque De Frente y fondo',as a kind of superior version of himself.
The self-interviews in which the president speaks in English, the hundreds of meetings he cites to give an account of the efforts carried out by his government, without the slightest reform being possible in three years, the infinite hours he devoted to television in the Prevention and Action program against COVID, which came to an end because the strike forced him to turn off the reflectors, are proof of an inability to look at the beam in his own eye and dedicate himself instead to constructing narratives against his old men. political opponents, as is the case of Gustavo Petro.
After a month, no one feels represented by the Unemployment Committee, but neither by the Government. Citizens against citizens, while the professional agitators and the actors of all the crossed violence that we have in Colombia, those of drug trafficking, those of dissidents, those of the rabid without limits, those of the armed left and right, took the strike. The public force is seen as an enemy and not as a guarantor, armed groups of all kinds recruit young people from the gangs, a whole force of urban structures that quickly organize with their hidden faces to make chaos of every day.
The lack of early recognition of police abuses today prevents the Government from using the public force to unblock.
They preferred to leave their own men dirty instead of asking for forgiveness and rebuilding the course, so as not to give in to self-criticism and now they are not able to take them out to the streets for fear of international oversight, which already accounts for human rights abuses , and disappearances.
They were left without authority.
Hopefully the experience of the vice president and now Foreign Minister Marta Lucia Ramírez prevails over this institutional deterioration.
It is a good sign that in the end you have accepted the IACHR's visit.
