Gustavo Pedro, together with Fico Gutiérrez, during a presidential debate. YURI CORTEZ (AFP)
Chronicle of a Latin American subversive
is the title of a film by Mauricio Walerstein (1945-2016), a Venezuelan filmmaker of Mexican origin, who in the second half of the seventies of the last century became interested in certain testimonial literature that at that time prospered in your adopted country.
It narrated the melodrama of an urban guerrilla cell that kidnaps a US military attache in Caracas.
In exchange for the life of the gringo colonel, the urban guerrilla demands the suspension of the death sentence to which a military court in the former South Vietnam had sentenced a Vietcong guerrilla.
Based on a real event, which occurred during the previous decade, the film resorts, hackneyed, to the forced coexistence of the gringo colonel and his captors.
The dialogues between the guerrillas and the gringo colonel—played by the great Claudio Brook—, blaming each other for the iniquities of the Cold War, are certainly not the best thing about the film by the remembered Mauricio;
his triumph lies elsewhere: it is in the detached way of telling how the political bureau of the Communist Party, which has resolved to abandon the armed struggle for the mass struggle and is in the process of pacifying, completely disregards the cell guerrilla.
__I have a gringo colonel blindfolded and handcuffed in an apartment on loan for the weekend, the entire Army is combing the city, and right now you are telling me that neither objective nor subjective conditions exist for an armed propaganda action?— The angry commander of the cell complains to the bureau contact who transmits the order to release the soldier.
The room – then even the cinema was a thing of rooms in the dark – bursts out laughing.
The Castro-inspired guerrilla of the 1960s was defeated in Venezuela and some of its former commanders, after serving prison sentences or returning from exile, wrote and published their version of what happened when they were up in arms.
From there Mauricio extracted his argument.
Most of the former commanders blamed the failure on the political leadership and were reluctant to "reinvent" themselves as social democrats, advanced reformists.
However, very few relapsed into the armed struggle, where more than one lost his life.
An even smaller handful ended up imbued with an all-purpose cynicism that passed for the disillusioned wisdom of an old soldier.
From this last group came Chavez's ministers who ended up looting the state oil company and ruining the country.
Not all of those men and women were fanatics or base people or sold their souls.
Américo Martín, a former guerrilla fighter from the extreme left, who died at the age of 84 last February in the midst of national respect, became an outstanding voice of the liberal idea in our America.
A great reader, when speaking of the political fortune of the commanders, Martín humorously paraphrased F. Scott Fitzgerald's sentence: "in Latin America there is no second act for ex-guerrillas."
I wonder what he would say today, in the imminence of Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter, becoming the first left-wing president elected by direct vote in two hundred and eleven years of Colombian history.
This fact alone, the successful metamorphosis from guerrilla fighter to constitutional president of a country of 50 million inhabitants, would give a Petro victory an epochal character, to use the suggestive expression of the historians of L'École des Annales.
I came to Colombia for the first time in 1991, in time to see the proclamation of the Constitution that was signed at the same time by a liberal political drummer, a staunch conservative and a former commander of the M-19, Petro's partner in struggle.
I am, as one day my dear friend Carlos Franz and I agreed to define ourselves politically, a type of liberal center-left, a legatee of the ideas of Teodoro Petkoff and I congratulate myself for having chosen Bogotá as a place of exile.
I have already witnessed four electoral campaigns here.
See the one from Ciénaga de Oro fight against all the great white hopes of the Colombian right and beat them!
It will be for me like watching
Muhammad Ali give the battle of Kinshasha in 1974 from
ringside .
So I will leave for August 8 the alarms against the authoritarian temptation that Gustavo Petro and my Venezuelans warn against their zombie ideas in oil matters with ample reason.
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