President-elect Gustavo Petro received this Tuesday, in the center of Bogotá, the report of the Truth Commission that gives recommendations to the new government to stop the six-decade conflict in Colombia and recognize the causes of the war.
Petro, who attended the event with Vice President-elect Francia Márquez, was applauded by the audience at the Jorge Eliecer Gaitán Theater, where the Commission's report was presented.
The incumbent president, Iván Duque, was booed at the event for his absence.
"The approach to the truth cannot be considered as a space for revenge, as if it were an extension of weapons," Petro said before the commissioners and victims who attended the event.
The truth, he continued, must have as its objective “reconciliation, national and social coexistence”.
Petro referred to the victory of his project a week ago as a sign in favor of the peace agreement that was signed in 2016 between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the extinct FARC guerrilla.
"There are expectations of peace, of a great peace," said the president-elect.
A lasting peace is not only "closing some conflicts so that new armed conflicts begin, but also so that the use of weapons disappears as the instrument that belies the possibilities of the Agreement, as the instrument of revenge".
Societies will always have conflicts, disagreements, the next president added, "but conflict cannot be synonymous with death, conflict must be synonymous with life."
The day is symbolic for Petro for several reasons.
On the one hand, because several of those who allowed him to win in the second presidential round are the voters in municipalities that have suffered the most from the armed conflict, and who voted in favor of the 2016 referendum to approve the Peace Agreement.
Petro is part of a peace process at the end of the eighties, in addition, as a former member of the M-19 guerrilla who later joined politics.
But also because several of the recommendations of the Truth Commission, which were delivered to Petro on Tuesday, are in line with his government program, such as the urgency of a comprehensive agrarian reform, complying with the political reform requested by the Agreement, or reform the police forces that have violently suppressed social protest.
"Someone said violence is the midwife of history," Petro said in his words at the Teatro Colón.
The phrase is from Karl Marx, the historian and philosopher who at the end of the 19th century saw in the revolution the possibility of ending the capitalist system, just as the violence of the French revolution ended the monarchy.
But the desire for revolution of the Colombian guerrillas, however, never brought changes but rather several cycles of violence.
"A cluster of violence," Petro called it.
“How many peace processes have we signed in our republican history and how many times have we returned to violence?” asked the president who signed one of those several peace processes that were signed in the 20th century.
Violence, he added, is not something that is carried in the genes, and the truth is not a guide to revenge but to reconciliation.
Petro recalled one of the controversies during the campaign, when he spoke of a possible "social pardon" with people convicted of various crimes in La Picota prison in Bogotá.
"What follows the truth, deep down, and depends on the victims and no one else in Colombia, is the possibility of social forgiveness," he said.
“The possibility of another story”.
Then Petro made a reference to the most famous story in Colombia, the
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, a book that ends with the famous phrase "because the lineages condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second chance on earth" .
The president-elect called himself after one of the characters in the novel, Aureliano, when he was in the M-19 guerrilla.
Petro said in his speech today that in Colombia we should talk about 200 years of solitude, not 100 years: since Colombian independence from the Spanish colony, two centuries in which there have been several wars in cycle, one after another.
"The generations of 200 years of solitude do have a second chance on earth," Petro concluded, optimistic, and receiving the recommendations of the Truth Commission that heard some 30,000 people who lived through the war.
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