Digressions for Journalist's Day

The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, at the General José María Córdoba Military Cadet School, in Bogotá, on August 20, 2022.Photo Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images

In June of last year, after the elections won by Gustavo Petro, I wrote in this newspaper that this result seemed to me the best thing that could happen to Colombia.

Not because of him, who was not my candidate and has never inspired me the slightest confidence, but because his party's program promised a seamless commitment to the correct implementation of the Teatro Colón Agreements, which the government of Iván Duque applied mediocrely. and selectively when he did not consciously sabotage them.

The other reason why the victory of the Historical Pact seemed positive to me was very simple: the option was Rodolfo Hernández, a populist who was incompetent as hell, fabricated by the frivolity of social networks and our fear of change, and too susceptible to the most reactionary areas of the right.

It is true, yes: I would have liked a government party that did not come to power running along ethical lines, according to the cynical expression of a strategist that many have already forgotten, nor waging dirty war against opponents because some did it to him them.

I do not know if in the future this country will deserve that a presidential election not be a neighborhood of moral turpitude: I do not know if we will deserve to be governed by a party that does not believe that anything goes, that is not willing to draw lines or fabricate smears, and, above all, that he does not easily justify what in the opponent he would condemn without hesitation.

When the dirty tactics against the right-wing candidate came to light (with bad art, as things come to light in this country), Uribismo raised a cry to heaven;

but, as I have said elsewhere,

In any case, I've been wanting this government to do well for six months.

Not only because his failure would be a failure for everyone, not only for those who voted for him, but because the slow invention of a sensible and democratic left seems to me a matter of urgency, and that does not seem possible if this president commits more foolish things than Let democracy hold.

That is why I am disappointed and concerned about Petro's recent drifts, that he seems to believe with a part of his head that he is not yet president, but rather that he is still a candidate.

I am not the first to notice that Petro, when he invites people to demonstrate in favor of laws that nobody knows about, when he asks people to come out to "discuss the reforms in the street",

He is relying on strategies that are too similar to the "state of opinion" with which Uribe wanted to remove the legal obstacles that stood between him and his country model.

This is how it goes for us Colombians: each side believes that shortcuts are right if they take them, and very wrong if others take them.

In reality, Petro cannot think that anything is going to be discussed in the street, neither seriously nor without it: he wants to bypass the channels of deliberation that are typical of a mature democracy to exchange ideas for emotions, and the less informed, better.

Of course, when I speak of mature democracy, I am imagining something very different from what happens in congress;

When I speak of deliberation, I am not referring to the unreasonableness, the rhetorical violence and the serial nonsense of so many representatives of our outrageous right, those professional bullies who seem convinced that political success can only be achieved if enough hatred is sown, if the Political differences turn into virtual knife fights if there is blood in the arena.

I have several names in mind;

When I think of them and what they say,

Of course, changing reason for emotions is the first item in the decalogue of the perfect populist.

You have to move the sides and then, as a poem says, have someone come to pick up the remains.

The fascinating thing about Petro's show is that everything seems to happen in spite of himself, as if the populist he has carried inside him all his life sometimes slips out without permission: he suddenly declares that "money is thrown away" on 4G highways, because they only contribute to the “capitalist concept of speed”, and he doesn't even blush after such nonsense.

When I read these words, I had to go and verify that the quote came from a reliable source: it did not seem credible to me that it had come from the public statements of a sitting president, and not from the school essay of a teenager who had just read his first summary. of Marx.

Well, that populist that Petro has inside has come out again in recent days, this time to attack the media.

He has accused them of being part of the “establishment,” which, coming from a sitting president who has been in the political elite for decades, is contradictory to say the least;

and he is also an amnesiac, since some of those “establishment” media contain the opinion columns that helped bring him to the presidency, not to mention the reports that collected his denunciations as a congressman and built his reputation as a formidable opponent.

In Colombian journalism there are better and worse practitioners, there are fair and professional and also mediocre and unfair, there are sectarians and moderates and clairvoyant and confused;

but the trade we call journalism, which is the place where everyone works,

The president has every right to defend himself against criticism, but one would appreciate it if the defense was given against the wrong figures and fallacious arguments, not against the union, much less against that gaseous entity that is used for everything: the "establishment".

The incontrovertible truth is that undermining the credibility of critical media can make the president uncomfortable, but it will also make society defenseless.

I had to write something very similar several times during the last three years of the Uribe government: I don't know if that means something.

Let's remember all this today, when we celebrate a day that is only celebrated because journalists—at all times and in all places—have been uncomfortable and have been attacked for being so.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

is a writer.

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