Juan Gabriel Vásquez: "We tolerate violence a lot"

Colombian writer, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, in his apartment north of Bogotá.

May 4, 2022Camilo Rozo

"I write because there is something I don't understand, that seems dark to me, and fiction writing is a way of questioning that reality, and one of my obsessions is the relationship we have with our past," Colombian writer Juan Gabriel has said on several occasions. Vasquez (Bogotá, 49 years old).

The author of works such as

,

,

,

or Looking

, reflects on that past of violence that Colombia has not been able to leave behind.

He revisits his columns for a decade in the book

and, sipping a coffee that he has prepared, he talks about the peace process as that great opportunity that the country has missed.

Ask.

In his latest book,

, he recalls a painful phrase that is in

From him: "Every Colombian is an enemy country."

Response.

I think it somehow defines what we have been through in recent years, particularly since the peace negotiations and the 2016 plebiscite, which is the feeling of living in a broken, confronted country, where the provocations that our political leaders consciously make us they have become a society of small fundamentalisms, of small fanaticisms, in which the enemy is the other.

The enemy is the one who doesn't think like me.

Q.

In your columns for a decade, the idea that Colombia is a society used to dividing flies over the air.

R.

For me a unanimous society is a danger.

Unanimity only exists in a totalitarian society.

I believe in the contradiction, in the debate and in the need for not everyone to think the same, even in the contradictions that occur in very lively ways, very exacerbated.

But that democratic debate is not what we are seeing.

What we are seeing is a transformation of the opponent into an enemy and a consideration that the one who does not think like us is not that he has another opinion, but that he is lying and is dishonest.

And the last few years of Colombian politics have accustomed us to that vision.

That is extremely dangerous, it breaks any possibility of social collaboration and also generates a lot of violence in a country like ours, which over the years has shown that it has a very tolerant relationship with violence.

Q.

That has happened long before 2016, why part of that date?

R.

I did have hope that the agreements would break with a dynamic of violence that had been fed back for many years.

I do not pass.

Partly as a result of a very successful campaign of lies, slander and disinformation carried out by the No to Agreements.

But that is not the reason why I choose 2016. I start from there because that year a number of new mechanisms of our social conversation entered the scene that for me define many of the things that happened.

P.

What was it that changed then?

R.

That same year the victory of Donald Trump, of Brexit, of the dramatic rupture of Catalan society and the victory of the No to agreements coincide.

They all had the same point in common, which was a completely new relationship that we citizens began to have with the truth and with political lies.

Of course, the two things go hand in hand.

It is not for nothing that the word of that year was post-truth.

P.

It refers to the concept of rupture of the shared reality

R.

We are discovering that what we had always seen, which was the political lie, suddenly became something else as a result of our activity on social networks.

The effective disappearance of a shared reality.

We all stop seeing the same reality.

The functioning of the algorithms in social networks determined that each citizen was presented with a special reality that coincided with his prejudices, his hatreds, his political or religious loyalties.

And that, effectively, was breaking the notion of common reality and making dialogue and the ability to clearly read the reality that we were judging with our votes impossible.

Hence so many catastrophes that occurred at the polls.

P.

You affirm that "we were never so prepared to exercise or tolerate violence as we are now."

A: There is a very strange feature that we have as a society and it is the conviction that good violence exists, as the peace negotiator Humberto de la Calle wrote.

The tolerance we have to accept and admit violence when the one who suffers it is our political enemy.

And that, which is something that has marked us as a society, comes the civil wars of the 19th century. We are a society that very easily accepts violence whenever it happens to the other.

Either we close our eyes to it or we are accomplices.

This is undermining trust among citizens, which distinguishes a functional democracy.

Q.

What did this government mean for peace?

R.

The peace agreement was a promise of opportunities, and most of them have been wasted.

Duque's government is one of wasted opportunities.

For a few months now, he has tried to make up for lost time with the implementation of certain well-chosen areas of the peace agreements, especially in what has to do with the demobilized and with activity in certain rural areas.

But this was a government that came to power on the horse of delegitimizing the agreements, of not recognizing them.

A government in which political figures who have openly ignored the institutions that come out of the agreements have a lot of weight.

And the government has been complicit in delegitimizing these institutions of the Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and the Truth Commission.

Q.

Do you think Colombia will have another chance?

R.

There is still much to rescue.

What has come out in terms of public truths is essential for a country like ours.

There is no possible reconciliation, no possibility of advancing or turning the page on the war without a process of public acknowledgment of the facts of the war.

I think that, for a victim of a war like ours, the only thing left is the story of what happened to him.

He wants the country, a government, the representatives of civil society, to hear her story, recognize it and say 'yes, you suffered'.

That's all they have left.

When society turns its back on the victims.

When Álvaro Uribe, for example, says that the victims of the false positives would not be picking coffee,

When there are so many small statements that come from the structures of the country that deny or ignore or underestimate the story of the victims, tremendous damage is done.

The Truth Commission and the Jurisdiction for Peace are the two spaces where this is being recognized and that is tremendously positive.

For me that is hope.

The award-winning writer affirms that the country will vote between rage and fear in the presidential elections.

Camilo Rozo

P.

What is the narrative of the nation that we are building like?

A:

The peace agreements seek to open spaces where everyone can tell their story.

That at the end of such a tangled war, with so many actors, so many different mechanisms, is very necessary.

We all live installed in our own story, but that's not how a country is made, much less a war is left behind.

The war is left behind when we open a space where each one of us, in his story, realizes that there are other stories that tell another experience of the war and that they are valid and have the right to exist in that daily negotiation that is a democracy.

P.

That story will be put to the test with the Final Report of the Truth Commission.

R.

There are many powerful figures in Colombian politics who refuse to accept the other's version, the other's version of the war seems to them, by definition, to be a lie.

Then they realize that all of this has a very important narrative character and that what they have to do is open a space where everyone's versions have a place.

That's where those of us who tell stories and who have or have a great responsibility come in.

Because journalism, history and literature are places where these stories are told in a privileged way, in a visible, notorious way.

And all, all the novels, the chronicles, the articles, the history books that are published about this are putting one more piece in the great puzzle of the Colombian war.

Q.

Fiction, how does it contribute to the construction of that story?

R.

Fiction reaches this reality in a special way.

Fiction for me is a form of knowledge.

What we know through fiction are things that journalism does not have access to and history does not have access to.

There is a whole aspect that is invisible, that occurs in emotions, in morality, in secret places in our life, in our experience, places that are not visible.

Journalism and history deal wonderfully with all that is visible;

but of those places that occur in invisible parts of who we are as human beings.

That tells the fiction.

That is why a novel like Tolstoy's

tells us things about the Napoleonic wars that the history books do not tell us.

Q.

How does that obsession appear in Colombian literature?

A.

Colombian literature has always been looking for a way around this issue of violence.

We understand corners of the violence in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, that otherwise we would not understand.

The first great novel of the 20th century is

and it begins by saying: 'I played my heart at random and violence won it'.

From there, the Colombian novel is obsessed with finding out what the internal mechanisms are, what makes us inside, how to tell the effects that the novel has on our invisible lives to complete the picture of what the history of journalism tells.

Frequent those great fictions of the past can make it easier for us to correctly read our present moment.

P.

And how is that search in your novels?

R.

I somehow did it very directly in

and in

and in the last one,

, much more.

Q.

On the other hand, there are the columns.

R.

There is an essay in which Paul Valéry said that one of the problems we have as human beings is that the future has no image.

So, to know what is going to happen to us as a society, the only thing we have is to look at the past.

And I think that today, especially among the Colombian political elites, there is not much interest in finding out about the past.

The past is an unpleasant thing.

It is annoying and that is why there is so much hostility towards the institutions of the peace agreements, which are institutions dedicated to the past.

P.

Regarding the future and, in the midst of the electoral situation, with weakened confidence, what are your expectations?

R.

I made public my support for Sergio Fajardo's campaign because it seems to me that it is a responsible progressive proposal, which will defend the peace agreements, the rulings of the Constitutional Court on abortion;

will keep very clear lines between religion and politics, which I don't see in the other campaigns.

But I am perfectly aware that a series of internal mechanisms in the center group have hindered the real possibilities.

So I see a panorama of tension, of fanaticism where there is a kind of latent violence that can explode at any moment.

All of this fills me with pessimism.

We are a society that is going to vote between anger and fear and that cannot lead to anything good.

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