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Vargas Llosa, the wrong one is you

2022-07-07T10:38:09.775Z


The verdict made by the Nobel Prize on Colombia may sound good in Madrid, in front of its audience, but not in Bogotá


The writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature Mario Vargas Llosa has said in a sentence that we Colombians voted badly because we elected a former M-19 guerrilla as the country's new president.

"If you act legally, welcome," he said with a gesture of skepticism and deep mistrust and, as if he had already made his judgment about what is going to happen to Colombia, he dropped his ultimatum by concluding that the election of a former guerrilla in the presidency he endangered the legality that Colombia has had for years.

"There is a legality that has been maintained all these years despite the fact that the guerrillas represented something else," he concluded in his diatribe.

The verdict made by the Nobel on Colombia may sound good in Madrid, in front of his audience, but not in Bogotá.

Here his opinion is light, unfair and disrespectful to the 11 million Colombians who exercised their right to vote.

His opinion is based on stigma and moral disqualification and turns the Colombians who voted for Gustavo Petro into suspicious beings, who cannot be trusted.

Vargas Llosa is wrong from beginning to end in his reading of the political process that Colombia is going through.

Duque, the president he admires so much, leaves us with a country plunged into an institutional crisis of immense proportions.

Under his government, the political clans that function as mafias lived at ease and took over the control bodies.

We went backwards in almost everything: poverty increased again, we were again in the ranks of the most unequal countries in the world, the jungle was deforested and the implementation of peace was put on hold.

The hope for change that had been unleashed in all the regions affected by the war after the peace agreement was never met and Duque dedicated himself to governing for his own and traveling the world, promoting achievements that Colombians had never seen.

We don't vote wrong.

We voted for the change that Duque dammed.

It was not a suicidal act, as Vargas Llosa insinuates, but rather a legitimate aspiration, typical of democracies that are modernizing.

No country votes badly, when expressed at the polls.

And less when you vote for a change and choose that path consciously and freely.

Vargas Llosa disqualifies Gustavo Petro for having been a guerrilla and before he begins to govern, he predicts the worst.

However, in Colombia things are not so clear-cut.

Petro laid down his arms more than 30 years ago, when the M-19 guerrillas made a peace agreement with the government at the time.

Unarmed, they were part of the Constituent Assembly that drafted a new constitution that is in force today.

Since then they have been great defenders of legality, not its threat.

Former M-19 guerrillas have become mayors, governors, ministers and important intellectuals.

Some of them have even militated in the uribismo awnings, but the majority have invested their political capital in the construction of a democratic left that cut its ties with the guerrillas and opposes the armed struggle.

Despite these advances,

Petro's victory is also a slam on the armed struggle and all that it meant in Colombia.

Guerrillas prospered in the country because many progressive leaders who tried to come to power were killed.

With the election of Petro, that conspiracy ended and politics became democratized.

Vargas Llosa fears for the rule of law in Colombia and says that he sees "legality" threatened, but does not know its true nature.

Our legality has been perverse because during the war he learned to live with one foot illegal.

The report of the Truth Commission has just said that when it affirms that the conflict in Colombia did not take place between two armed groups, but that it was a whole network in which many sectors of society, legal and illegal, participated.

Vargas Llosa is a writer and essayist who has captivated the world.

However, when he gets into politics he almost never gets it right.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-07-07

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