Humanity was going to be better.
The same plague that annihilated millions was going to elevate us to the virtuous circle where equity, solidarity and justice orbit.
In March, in June, in October 2020, the Improvement Theory – so Christian: to ascend to the kingdom you have to suffer – expanded: nothing was going to be the same after this unforgettable lesson.
Actors and actresses, uncles and cousins,
tiktokers
and
instagramers said it
: “This will teach us what the really important things are.”
The affections, the family, the dispossessed of the earth would reign in our hearts, displacing the false idols: money, ambition, material goods.
The advertisements conformed to the new paradigm and showed images of confined children and parents playing on feather quilts (the importance of being with the family);
of friends celebrating birthdays via zoom and excited at the idea of meeting again (the importance of ties).
And as if millions of people - reporters, NGOs, activists of all kinds - had not denounced inequality for decades, many said: "Covid has helped us realize that there is enormous inequality."
After two years in which the planet was more or less stopped, someone turned up the lever of the switch and the light has returned.
It is a dim light, a bit dead, but it is enough to see that everything continues as we had left it and, sometimes, much worse.
The good intentions remained where they had always been – in a
sticker phrase
-, and we rush towards the future urgent to recover our passport stamped with the stamps that guarantee life as we knew it.
The past wants to speak, but nobody wants to listen to it.
Sometimes I remember a woman -Sarita- who in the southern winter of 2020, in full mandatory confinement, was accused of being a dangerous agent spreading the virus for having gone out to sunbathe in a deserted square in Buenos Aires.
Sometimes I remember that in mid-April 2020, Florencia Magalí Morales, 39 years old, mother of two children, was detained by the police in Santa Rosa de Conlara, province of San Luis, Argentina, accused of violating the quarantine because she had gone out to buy food by bike.
She was taken to the police station and hours later she was found dead in her cell.
The agents said that she had committed suicide.
The tests revealed that she had suffocated to death, that she presented “signs compatible with self-defense”, that they had urinated on her body.
There are four police officers investigated for "application of severity to a detainee, undue confinement, abuse of authority and breach of the duties of a public official."
The pandemic as a shield for impunity, the body of the other as a viral bomb, the domestic space as the only safe place: somehow, all these deformities were going to make us better.
The Theory of Improvement is based on a strange idea: what happens is good.
Poverty is an opportunity to overcome;
cancer, to be humble.
In his book The Palliative Society, the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we live in a society that has developed a phobia of pain and that the imperative “be happy” is the result of an ultra-capitalist performance requirement: the sad do not produce .
"Nothing should hurt," writes Chul Han.
Not only art, but life itself must be able to be uploaded to Instagram, that is, it must lack conflicts and contradictions that could be painful”.
Of course the drunk guy who always crashes our party manages to sneak in and bring bad news.
We now know that extreme poverty has increased for the first time in 20 years (100 million more live on less than $1.90 a day, according to World Bank data).
The 2021 data from the annual report of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) indicated that 2020 was the ninth consecutive year of increase in refugees and displaced persons, so that there are currently more than twice as many forcibly displaced people. than a decade ago.
In April 2022, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) noted that “only 15.21% of the population in low-income countries have received a dose of the covid vaccine,
which creates a pattern of unequal distribution within and between countries, which reproduces slavery and the racial hierarchies of the colonial era”.
Proposals to release patents have failed time and time again, vetoed by countries that have assured distribution.
According to the Regional Panorama of Food and Nutrition Security, between 2019 and 2020 the number of hungry people in Latin America increased by 13.8 million.
The Spanish foundation Anar, which manages helplines for minors with mental health problems or who suffer violence, reported in April 2022 that calls for suicidal ideation or attempt multiplied by 12 in the last decade and that related cases with mental health rose 54.6% compared to 2020. And last February, without having come out of the pandemic,
or without the lords of the WHO having decreed it, Russia invaded the Ukraine and a war broke out.
That swallowed everything: the front pages, the public conversation.
The unequals remain just as unequal, as much in the shadows as ever.
The unknown is that word: they continue.
Sometimes I wonder why.
In Colombia it is called
false positives
to the 6,402 civilians executed by the army of that country, largely during the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).
The military lured farmworkers, students, and the unemployed by trickery, executed them, and reported them as guerrillas.
The government could thus boast that its fight against the guerrillas was successful and the military obtained, in exchange, promotions and perks: one dead, one cucarda.
In 2016, the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC included the creation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), a court that investigates and judges those who participated in the armed conflict.
On April 26 and 27, 2022, the hearing related to the false positives was held in Ocaña, on the border with Venezuela.
Ten soldiers and one civilian testified.
They admitted to being responsible for 120 of those deaths.
Guerrero, a motorcycle taxi driver: they took him out of his house with the promise of hiring him a trip, they took him out of town and they executed him.
Non-commissioned officer Néstor Guillermo Gutiérrez admitted having participated in the murder of Javier Peñuela: they intercepted him when the man had gone to have a tooth pulled and executed him.
The military will benefit from lower sentences for these confessions.
The relatives, present in the room, wore T-shirts with the legend: “Who gave the order?”.
Since 2008, they denounce that the men whom the army designated as guerrillas are, in reality, their peasant children, their farmer parents.
But they also want to show that there was a plan: a state policy.
That it was not about the individual decisions of a group of lunatics.
“It would be important to mention General Mario Montoya,
Juan Manuel Santos, Minister of Defense, and former President Álvaro Uribe.
Don't cover them up.
That all those people who are behind this come to light and that the truth be clarified,” Claudia Patricia Barrientos, one of the victims, said during the hearing.
There are, in Colombia, some officers and non-commissioned officers who say "I took them to the field, I shot them to benefit a government."
Not many things like this happen in the immense courtyard of our region.
But we care more about the distant war, the bid of our rulers, Elon Musk.
In April, Joaquín Morales Solá, a columnist for the Argentine newspaper
La Nación
, asked Pope Francis in an interview why he had not traveled to kyiv, the capital of Ukraine: “What would be the use of the Pope going to kyiv if the war continued the next day?” the pope replied.
In the continent from which he comes, where a good part of his flock lives – 40% -, everything continues the next day.
The inequality continues the next day.
The state violence continues the next day.
Poverty continues the next day.
The word "struggle" -which is often used in phrases such as "struggle for equality", or "struggle for justice"- is defined as "Great and continuous effort made by a person to achieve an end".
Peace, reparation for victims, rights: none of this is obtained the next day.
It is obtained, as now, after fourteen years of insistence.
And in many cases not even.
I don't know what makes these people -hurt, humble- continue.
In Harper Lee's novel To Kill the Mockingbird, attorney Atticus Finch dares to defend a black man falsely accused of rape in racist Alabama in the 1930s. The novel was adapted into a film.
In the film, Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, explains to his children why he has decided to defend him: "One is brave when, knowing that the battle is lost, he tries despite everything and fights until the end." final.
One rarely wins, but sometimes wins".
Maybe what keeps them going is that.
The desperate hope that one, someday, wins.
While the rest of us are busy doing something else.
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