Notes for Sunday

Closing event of the presidential campaign in Barranquilla, on May 21, 2022. Charlie Cordero

The dirtiest, most bilious, most angry and most disgusting campaign that I remember is finally over, and this is written by someone who lived hell before the 2016 plebiscite very closely. On Monday we Colombians will wake up after having elected a new president, if the meager differences predicted by the polls have not led us to talk about fraud and coup d'état, and if the violence that we breathe every day has not embarked us on excesses that we can immediately repent .

Living in Colombia is accepting that the worst possible scenario is always as possible as the best: here there is never a prophecy so bad that it cannot be fulfilled.

But if everything goes as expected, there will be a new president-elect and we will all continue to live in the same boat,

and it will be necessary to understand that the failure of the next government would be the failure of all, not only of those who elected it.

And we will have to try, therefore, to avoid it as much as we can.

The bad thing is that there are serious reasons to doubt that we are capable of that minimum common sense.

In a book that I just published about the peace process, I remembered two sentences from

that seem to make an accurate diagnosis about our present.

"Each Colombian is an enemy country," says the Simón Bolívar of the novel.

And later: "All the ideas that occur to Colombians are to divide."

Anyone who has lived the last six years in this country recognizes the inner truth of these words, and perhaps also recognizes that we citizens have caused this irremediable poisoning of our coexistence.

Our worst traits have come out in this campaign: endemic racism and the most violent classism, and also our endless tolerance for violence, whenever it suits us, or against slander and moral murder, whenever they are used against others. .

What we saw in the videos of the petrista campaign was grotesque,

I have not had many certainties in this campaign, which has often been a crude festival of racketeering, opportunism and disloyalty, but I can count at least two.

First, that Petrism has embarked on an anything-goes ethic that may be good for the candidate, but will be bad for his movement;

and second, that Rodolfo Hernández represents (especially now, facing the second round) the worst of the coarsest populism and the most vulgar of demagoguery, as well as a reactionary, irresponsible, unpredictable policy in the worst sense and profoundly destabilizing.

And one day, when all this tension has subsided and we begin to look each other in the face again without the hatred that some carry as if they were taking care of something all the time, we will have to carefully find out when this happened to us:

Let's be clear: I have never had a good opinion of Petro.

Because of his inveterate sectarianism, of course, but above all because he has shown that no principle seems non-negotiable to him in the race for the presidency: not even opening his movement to a homophobic and anti-abortionist preacher ("egalitarian marriage is pure straw," that man wrote a few years ago), nor embracing known corrupt members of the darkest right, nor looking the other way while their trusted people conspire to demolish the center through disgusting tactics.

All of this has been regretted by those of us who want a solid and decent social democratic party in Colombia.

But Hernández's option would be truly catastrophic in many ways, and it is enough to see his promised decrees of a banana republic, more similar to Chavismo than anything else, to realize it.

We know that he wants to destroy the diplomatic service and eliminate (in his infinite ignorance) even embassies that do not exist;

we know that he would begin to rule by decreeing an absurd and dangerous internal commotion.

You hear a lot out there that you shouldn't believe everything he says, or that you shouldn't take him seriously.

But I won't be the first to recall how many times the same thing has been said about Trump, and now the United States is, for all practical purposes, a dysfunctional democracy.

So yes: what Hernández says must be taken seriously.

You have to take seriously his implausible machismo, and you have to take seriously the threats to shoot someone, the physical attacks and even the gun that his mother is proud of: all of that has to be taken seriously .

You have to take seriously the shamelessness with which he boasted, as a builder, of charging more than he owes to people who pay more than he can.

His way of treating his subordinates must be taken seriously, because nothing says more about a person than the treatment he gives those who depend on him, and nothing reveals character as much as the exercise of small powers.

His manifest willingness to wipe his ass with the law (sic) must be taken seriously, because it is exactly what others have done with other laws – the law of guarantees,

for example – and that is one of the reasons why we are the way we are.

But above all, we must take seriously the idea of ​​implementing the peace agreements, which against all odds have improved the lives of so many people and have revealed so many truths to us;

and all the enemies – of the negotiations, of the agreements, of their implementation – have united behind Hernández.

That, at least, is very clear.

Something else is also clear, although we seem to be too frayed to notice.

And it is this: that Sunday's elections are not only the end of something, but also the beginning.

In other words, this dirty, intemperate, hurtful and dishonest campaign is over, where several of the people who will be elected (no matter who one votes for) have already given ample evidence of not having the temperament or character to hold the reins from a country that is trying to free itself from a war mentality;

and where that campaign ends, something else begins, which is the country that follows, the country that begins on Monday, the country where we will have to continue seeing how we live together.

In other words: real life begins.

I use these words cautiously, because more than once in these months I have had the impression that a good part of our confrontations are artificial, an invention or manufacture of dark social networks, or their perverse dynamics that reward extremism.

“Slum of cutlers”, I have called them elsewhere, and seeing what has happened in the campaign –and also what journalists like Yohir Akerman have found out: see the magazine Cambio–

those words fall short.

I don't have and never have had networks, but those who live in them would do well to remember that someone is always consciously exploiting their fears and anger.

And beyond what happens on Sunday, democracy should not be this.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a writer.

His latest book is