“There is a future if there is truth”

It will be a long time, perhaps several years, before we finish understanding and assimilating what the report of the Truth Commission means in all its dimensions.

There are too many testimonies, too much pain, too much accumulated and entrenched truth.

An infinite violence with which we get used to living as if nothing were happening.

At a first glance, and without knowing everything in depth, I find that there are two immense contributions that the report makes on the road to overcoming the war: forcing us to recognize the conflict and facing us all in the face of what we did or allowed to do.

War is not only waged with bullets and bombs.

Given the thousands of testimonies of real people, it is impossible to deny that in Colombia we are experiencing a war, AN ARMED CONFLICT, to use the words that some wanted to erase from history.

Such a conflict exists and is there recounted by flesh and blood victims and perpetrators, with their duels and regrets on their backs.

Although it sounds hard to believe, in this country that has been in bloodshed for several generations, attempts have been made to deny the existence of an armed conflict and its causes and its multiple edges have been unknown.

We have not recognized as a society that the war was sustained and is sustained not only by weapons and money from drug trafficking and all illegal economies, but also by the action or omission of many sectors and people who do not take up arms, but have contributed to perpetuate barbarism.

That is why the Truth Commission touches nerves that hurt and shake.

That is why what he says bothers many.

In the end, each person has invented a story to justify the dead he carries or applauds and to continue surviving while violence passes before his eyes fueled by inequity, corruption and "every man for himself."

These truths challenge us all.

For years they tried to rewrite history to make us believe that everything that happened here did not happen or was not serious.

Some told us, and still tell us, that there are “good dead” and that the problem is a few “criminals” who have to be killed even though the Constitution does not have the death penalty.

Others told us that it was time to kidnap to "finance" a revolution. They recruited boys and girls for war, planted mines, threw bombs, tortured... All of the armed men raped women, all of them brutally killed, all of them violated laws and lost their humanity as they lose it. always the warriors. On all sides they turned poor young people dressed in civilian clothes or uniforms into an input of war. And despite the fact that these combatants left many dead, 80 percent of the victims were unarmed civilians.

They wanted to deny that war and that attempt to erase history became the seed of more violence.

Now, the Truth Commission report tells us what we knew and did not want to see or understand.

There is the portrait of war with all its ingredients: death, cruelty, dehumanization, degradation, violation of the civilian population, social, racial, gender violence.

"A nation violated and broken" as the report pointed out in its initial presentation.

We must value the spaces opened by the Commission so that victims and perpetrators meet and look each other in the eye.

You had to cry and curse.

You had to have this collective catharsis.

The leaders of opposing factions also spoke and told each other truths.

The paradox is that while some of those directly responsible for the war spoke out, acknowledged their crimes and apologized to the victims, there are others, those who have made the war an input for politics, who prefer to continue with hate speech and blaming others without accepting that politics has also stained its hands with blood.

As sectors of the economy, the State and the media were stained.

In each of them there are duels and there is guilt because they all have victims and also have perpetrators without a rifle.

In this woven quilt of a thousand pieces, each one demands that their truth be known and that is how it should be because there are many and different blows received and a great need for repair.

What is most clearly missing is that we collectively accept the degree of responsibility we bear for allowing this to happen.

What is missing is understanding that such a long and bloody war does not respond only to the armed.

This country will have to demobilize at some point if it does not want to keep repeating its history.

What is missing is understanding that such a long and bloody war does not respond only to the armed.

This country will have to demobilize at some point if it does not want to keep repeating its history.

What is missing is understanding that such a long and bloody war does not respond only to the armed.

This country will have to demobilize at some point if it does not want to keep repeating its history.

It is a report called to generate debate that must be studied calmly and rigorously by those who want to recount for history what has hit everyone.

We journalists, from our corner, will have to claim truth and justice for our dead, threatened and exiled who were victims for reporting the conflict.

And we will also have to accept the blame: recognize that we found formulas to say without saying, to tell and not tell, to fill pages and hours of radio and television with war stories that often justified or exacerbated the tragedy.

The horror became part of the landscape in the story.

And then, in recent years, when they wanted to banish the truth of the conflict from history, many bought an official version because that was easier than trying to understand what was happening in order to tell about it.

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