Pastusa artist, Daira Benavides, participates in the carnival for life, in Bogotá, this Sunday.Sebastián Barros
They called it the party of change, or the party of life, or the party that Gustavo Petro called.
For a country that takes rumba very seriously, this party is different.
The inauguration of the new president of Colombia this Sunday is not only attended by leaders from around the world –such as King Felipe VI;
the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric or the Argentinian Alberto Fernández– but Petro summoned thousands of citizens and artists to take over the country's squares.
The president-elect, a leftist leader who demonstrated his power to summon hundreds to his political events in the campaign, starts with a symbolic party to demonstrate what he repeated in the campaign: his is the government to expand democratic representation, for the excluded , for those who usually do not let in the party.
One of the first to arrive at the party was Dayra Benavides, a leader of the Blacks and Whites Carnival that is celebrated every year in the south west of the capital.
"For us, carnival is the meaning of our life," she says.
“We are disciples of dance, disciples of the carnival, we work all year to go out on one day, and this day for us is historic because Bogotá has not had a carnival for a long time.
Carnival is union, it does not divide but unites, it does not talk about wars, but about our stories, carnivals are a catharsis.
Bogotá needs this, we are going to exorcise many resentments through dance”.
Although the official possession was scheduled to start at 3:00 p.m., the popular festival started on Sunday around 8:00 a.m. in the center of Bogotá.
On the seventh avenue – one of the main avenues of the capital – troupes from various Andean areas of the country arrived, as well as graffiti artists, artisans and musicians.
On six other platforms, all installed in different squares of the historic center, musicians from all departments arrived – from the islands of San Andrés in the Caribbean to the eastern plains of the south east – to put on the soundtrack of the day: harps, joropo, ballet, pipers, hip-hop, cumbia, Andean flutes or Caribbean accordions.
In total, 70 cultural events were planned with 1,000 artists on stage or in the streets.
José Aldrumas Monroy, an old musician from the east of the country who has been playing llanera music for 40 years, prepares around 10 in the morning to play in the square known as Santander.
Although his entire band dressed in black this Sunday, Monroy comes dressed in white and excited because "the music of my plain, one of the most beautiful folklore there is, is valued today."
For him, the victory of Francia Márquez and Gustavo Petro is the opportunity to have a government that knows how difficult it is to survive on a tiny salary, to make a market in the midst of inflation and the high cost of living.
"We need more equality, because there are people who earn exorbitant salaries," says Monroy.
"The cost of living for the middle class is already impossible, the salary is not enough for anything."
Some stay to listen to Monroy's group, but most walk quickly towards the seventh avenue to reach the main square, Plaza de Bolívar, where there are two giant screens to see the inauguration of the new government.
Víctor Jiménez walks there, a man who carries in his arms a cardboard with the silhouette of Petro and Márquez, and who identifies himself as one of the “nobodies”.
Jiménez says that he was displaced by the violence after his brother was murdered in the department of Tolima for belonging to a leftist group.
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“Today I am vindicating my brother, he was resurrected today with the carnival of life,” says Jiménez.
“Today I am in carnival, today I am not in the presidential inauguration, today the world power of life begins, to be built from below with the blacks, the whites, the Indians, the whores and the queers.
We are going to live tasty”.
Jiménez's eyes water as he speaks.
The carnival is also to exorcise the demands, the high expectations that the excluded have with the new leftist government.
More cheerful, not far from Jiménez, a young Afro-Colombian woman, Mardis Redondo Vanegas, who studies law in the capital but comes from the Caribbean department of Guajira, walks quickly towards the main square.
For the party, she chose earrings in the shape of the continent of Africa and a long red dress, because that color "represents strength, temperance and character, which is what we peoples have had to have a day like today, a day of change and transformation." in democracy”.
Of all the promises of change from Márquez and Petro, what she most hopes will change with this new government is “the way politics is being seen.
Historically, it has been seen as an elite exercise, and that is what I would like to see changed, that power really be transferred to the people, who are the ones who decide on the future of the country,
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The Plaza de Bolívar, where the inauguration would take place, was full from the first hour.
Indigenous groups, Afro-Colombians, survivors of the political genocide against the left-wing party UP ("we cannot believe that this day has come," says one of them), plus hundreds more citizens who wait patiently while in the background They listen to a hip-hop group sing.
Petro always says that he wants to turn Colombia into the "world power of life."
He is not yet power.
But on his first day, or on his first party, there is a lot of life.
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