With the coming to power of Gustavo Petro, Colombia returns to talk of peace after the parenthesis that meant the Government of Iván Duque.
The president, who took office a little over a month ago, travels to New York this Sunday to participate for the first time as head of state in the United Nations General Assembly.
There, in the sculpture garden of the UN headquarters, you can come across the work
Kusikawsay,
the second of the three monuments made with the molten metal of the weapons of the extinct FARC guerrilla that were contemplated in the agreement of peace that is now more than five years old.
The fate of the rebel arsenal emerged several times as a sticking point in the Havana talks.
So much so that the historic pact speaks of "laying down" weapons instead of "surrendering" them, at the insistence of the FARC.
The negotiators agreed that the UN would receive the weapons, then it would be destroyed and three monuments would be built with that metal.
One in Bogotá, which is
Fragmentos
, the "counter-monument" devised by Doris Salcedo;
another at the UN headquarters in New York, which has never had a presentation ceremony;
and the third in Cuba, the venue for the talks, which has not been launched due to the deterioration of relations between Bogotá and Havana during the Duque Administration.
The New York monument had a particular process, more cumbersome and with greater technical restrictions, which included a public call at the end of the Government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018).
It was won by the artist Mario Opazo (Tomé, Chile, 53 years old), who has lived in Colombia for more than 30 years and is a professor at the National University.
With seven tons of ammunition he built
Kusikawsay
, which means “new and adventurous life” in the Quechua language.
It is
a kind of indigenous canoe, a canoe, that comes out of the ground like a projectile.
“All poetry has to do with the way in which our ancestral cultures, and other global cultures, meet or coincide in a notion of death as another life, as a happy life, of well-being;
the beyond as a dimension to which you have to go in a vehicle, in a ship, ”explains Opazo in a conversation with EL PAÍS at the kitchen table of his apartment in Bogotá.
"I feel more Colombian than Chilean," says the artist without any trace of an accent.
"I participated in the call as a citizen who was hurt by the Colombian state of war."
The artist Mario Opazo, in Bogotá, Colombia, on September 16. Gladys Serrano
All the execution of the work was carried out before the first year of the Duke period.
Then the outbreak of the pandemic disrupted any plan.
But the delays did not end there.
Kusikawsay
had to overcome countless bureaucratic and logistical obstacles for his transfer and installation in New York.
Opazo says that, after having made preparatory visits, he spent seven months asking for a photo of the sculpture located at the Ministry of Culture, but it never arrived.
The first image was seen on Instagram, until he finally visited New York last April.
Duque was elected with the support of the sectors that opposed the negotiations, and his four years in the House of Nariño were consumed without any kind of ceremony.
The now former president, in fact, was absent from most of the big events related to peace.
He did not go to the installation act of the Truth Commission, in November 2018, nor to the public delivery of its long-awaited final report, a moving event last July to which Petro, by then president-elect, did go.
Duque also did not go to the inauguration of
Fragmentos,
in December 2018, and a reference to the other two monuments was never heard.
In stark contrast, Petro's arrival offers a second chance for Colombia's peace monuments.
Since the campaign itself, the left-wing president has proposed to give a new impetus to the fragile implementation of the agreement with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, today converted into the Comunes political party, and resume talks with the ELN, the last guerrilla active in the country.
He is also advancing a policy of bringing other criminal groups to justice as part of his ambitious quest for "total peace."
Petro has also shown that he attaches great value to the symbolic since his own investiture, in which he ordered to wear Bolívar's sword.
He also planned that 'The Dove of Peace' would have a role in the ceremony, the sculpture that Fernando Botero donated to the Santos Government and that was banished from the Casa de Nariño to the National Museum during Duque's four-year term.
The obstacles of the outgoing government prevented it, but Petro in any case reinstalled her in the government palace before completing her first month as president: "again in her place," she wrote on her social networks to accompany a photo with the plump white dove with a golden beak.
President Gustavo Petro next to the work 'The dove of peace', on September 1, 2022. PRESIDENCY OF COLOMBIA
Santos himself, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, at a recent public event asked the new foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva, who also participated in the talks in Havana, to inaugurate the work that is located in the gardens of the UN, in addition to promote the third monument in Havana.
Mario Opazo has already been sought by sectors related to the new government, although the president's official agenda next week in New York does not include, at the moment, any act with
Kusikawsay
.
When he visited the monument in April, the artist was shocked to see it standing just meters from a fragment of the Berlin Wall.
“The presences that exist in that space refer to very significant events in contemporary world history, from World War II to Perestroika, events that are in the memory of all humanity,” reflects Opazo.
"And one of those concerns the peace process in Colombia."
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the key information on the country's current affairs.