Gustavo Petro, Roberto Pombo (host), Federico Gutiérrez and Sergio Fajardo during the debate this Thursday. Camilo Rozo
Raise the curtain. There are three sad pre-candidates sitting on the huge stage – the luminous stage of the first presidential debate on Caracol Radio, W Radio and EL PAÍS – ready to demonstrate from 7:00 in the morning that the other two are indeed politicians. The three are the first in the polls of their coalitions: from left to right, as it is said in the photos, Gustavo Petro, Sergio Fajardo and Federico Gutiérrez. Former congressman Petro, unbeatable in this kind of meeting, has managed to represent that enormous Colombia within Colombia that has not only been very little represented, but also very little seen, yes, denied to death. Former Governor Sergio Fajardo, persecuted to the point of ruin by control agencies, seeks to embody the reformism without any hint of revenge that the Liberal Party once wanted to embody. Former Mayor Federico Gutierrez,With a reputation for the heavy hand of those from before, he sticks his neck out for that right wing that exasperates politics: here we did not come to talk, but to do.
Colombia always looks the same if you look at it up close: according to Indepaz, which knows what it sees, so far in 2022, 57 Colombians have been murdered in 13 massacres in 10 departments of the country. But the country has been transforming like so many human experiments on Earth: the clear but brutal bipartisanship that came to promote civil wars in the past two centuries, and that in the last three decades was replaced by a trail of movements with an expiration date more similar to soccer clubs than political organizations, today it is a battle between three hard-fought coalitions. Petro leads the polls of the Historical Pact. Fajardo is still, despite everything, the strongest of the hopefuls of the Coalition of Hope. Gutiérrez, of the so-called Team for Colombia,It seems to be the favorite of voters who fear progressivism as they used to fear Judeo-Masonic conspiracies: "Castrochavism!"
Something must have changed in the country during the violent and banal years of President Duque –perhaps the unforgivable reissue of the war, once again completely delegated to the Military Forces, has stirred the national stomachs one by one– so that the three The main candidates of these three textbook political forces have in common the fact that they have voted yes to the peace accords with the FARC, and the conviction of defending their implementation.
It is certain that the three, from left to right, also consider that poverty, exploitation, segregation, classism and machismo are contrary to democracy.
And yet, the first Prisa Media presidential debate, shrewdly conducted by journalist Roberto Pombo, very quickly answers the question of what it means to vote for each one.
The articulate Petro, closer to Fajardo than it sounds, speaks of defending the development that peace brings, of not depending on the same fossil products as always, of leaving rentier Colombia behind, of dismantling the many causes of crime starting with hunger, to recover employment, so beaten, raising tariffs in industries devastated by savage capitalism. The redeemed Fajardo, closer to Petro than it seems, speaks of an urgent change in the economic model, of creating caring environments so that young people do not end up in crime, of a redoubled and free education that frees them from the tragedy of inequalities , of a training for work that brings forward the country lagging behind in the regions. Manager Gutiérrez talks about looking forward, adding opportunities to safety,of exchanging rhetoric for administration, of replacing ideology with common sense, of defeating populism through free enterprise, through 4G, 5G competitiveness.
It is clear, by 8:00 am, that this long campaign is so far beginning: who knows where our plot full of plots will end. But from now on, it can be said that another president who counts the bodies of internal enemies but does not pay attention to the numbers of civilians killed in the four cardinal points is not convenient for this country in suspense: Colombia cannot support even one more of these developmentalist managers with airs
coach
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who see the country as a very beautiful craft, insist on prohibition as henchmen of Republican senators, celebrate an austere State dedicated to processing business, confuse a critical spirit with treason, connect with citizens by making the sign of the cross, survive protests saying that they are conspiracies of the opposition and they are frankly convinced that democracy will come in addition if a handful of public works are carried out.
Lower the curtain. Come down, of course, because this debate has had some theater: not only because the three candidates have interpreted their characters according to their talents from their wheelchairs, but because, while doing everything possible and impossible to prove to us that choosing them is a matter of life or death like everything here in Colombia, in the backstage in which so many decide to take revenge on politicians with their vote, it was still a mistake to despise the uribista Zuluaga, the candidate of that caudillista movement, uribismo, which has defined the country of XXI century, and it seemed wise not to take for granted the other candidates of the three competing coalitions,and kept rising and rising in the polls as a populist phenomenon to the letter -and continued to be the favorite of the networks and voters who no longer believe in anything- that noisy 76-year-old former mayor of Bucaramanga: the Santanderean engineer Rodolfo Hernandez.
Lower the curtain.
There is no time to waste: the engineer's skit, which only obeys itself, can overcome like a tropical storm those three reluctant coalitions that have cost so much to so many egos from left to right.
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