We are the captives of their mistakes, their dishonesties, their small or big mistakes.
I have thought that frequently in recent months, while candidates around the world, and also incumbent leaders, make decisions with the sole criterion of saving themselves from what they did before.
Trump may have many reasons for running for election for the second time, a rarity in American history, and one of them may be his excessive narcissism;
but the most important one right now – and for a few months now – is so simple that it is moving, and it also portrays the postmodern populist in full: Trump wants to be president because being president is the only way not to end up in jail.
That is what the most influential democracy on this continent of ours has been reduced to: its greatest dignity, its position of greatest nobility, has been reduced to the card in the board game that allowed the player to get out of jail.
I see it everywhere: with different nuances and different intensities, that is the same thing that happens in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Nicaragua.
In Venezuela, a corrupt regime that violates human rights every day has to stay in power at all costs, because Maduro and his kleptomaniacs know that some form of justice awaits them with their mouths open as soon as they lose an election: and That is the best incentive not to lose them, even if it is with traps, with intimidation, with persecution.
What happens in Nicaragua is even more obscene, if possible, but basically it is the same: what really prohibits the ridiculous couple from getting off their tiger is the certainty that the tiger would eat them immediately, as Churchill said happens to them. to the dictators, if only for the damage they have done in power: the suffering they have caused, the lives they have destroyed in front of the blind gaze of their accomplices (and in front of the conniving nonsense of that Colombian ambassador who marched to favor of Ortega).
The same thing happens in Brazil: the reason why the attempted coup d'état in Brasilia occurred, inspired in such diverse ways – and even caricatures – by January 6 at the Capitol in Washington, could have had more reasons than deep antipathy that Bolsonaro has for democracy when the left has won.
But what Bolsonaro has done since then, whether it be his massive marches (with the invaluable support of evangelical superstition and collective blindness) or the implausible proposal that his wife run for president, has the main intention of guarantee impunity.
Guarantee, in other words, that he will never be judged.
Judged for what?
For the coup attempt in Brasilia.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro wants to be president so as not to be imprisoned.
Of course, he also wants to be president to assure his accomplices that they won't go to jail either.
And with good reason, of course: because it was one of his closest accomplices, Lieutenant Mauro Cid, who got fed up with his four months in jail and decided to speak out.
And what he said is what he has Bolsonaro where he has him: in the 135 pages of a serious, credible and dangerous judicial accusation.
Dangerous for him, of course.
Power for what? Darío Echandía famously asked after Gaitán's murder.
For that, they would call him a Bolsonaro or a Trump: for impunity.
The problem is what societies pay when they become hostages to the guilt of their leaders: they pay first for the excesses of those leaders, and then they pay for what the leaders must do to avoid the consequences of their excesses.
This is how we Colombians were – we have been, I mean – for years.
Much of the politics of recent years has been done or not done with a single horizon in mind: protecting Uribe.
And this is how we have all seen ourselves, hostages to the destiny of one man, choosing prosecutors and approving laws and sabotaging peace processes that could have changed the lives of millions, all with the sole purpose that a former president does not have to deal with justice.
“They put a finger on Uribe and this country burns,” Francisco Santos obscenely said in 2014. We have been in this for ten years.
And we continue: “If they touch Petro, they touch us all,” said Gustavo Bolívar with his teenage gang rhetoric.
And that is worrying because Petro makes mistakes frequently, and he has already shown us his way of moving chips to cover up his own mistakes.
The appointment of Benedetti to a position that did not exist is so transparent in its purpose, and so downright cynical, that it is not necessary to comment on it again, at least not to say what so many have already said.
It is the same as always: our democracy, our taxes, our diplomacy in so many places, the stability that we have not known for years: everything put at the service of covering the gaps left by error, dishonesty, small or large slips.
And as it is now it will be later.
I am already beginning to make a list of the mistakes that Bukele and Milei will make due to clumsiness or incompetence or drunken power, and that will later lead them to new excesses designed to cover up or correct or protect them from the old ones.
We are captive to all that, I thought these days, or our democracy is, and we can't see how we can free ourselves.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
is a writer.
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