Democracy captivates Country America Colombia

We are captives of their mistakes, their dishonesty, their small mistakes. I’ve often thought about that in recent months, when candidates around the world, and even incumbent leaders, make decisions with the sole measure of protecting themselves from what they’ve done before. Trump may have several reasons for running for a second term, a rarity in American history, and one of them may be his excessive narcissism; But now the most important thing…

We are captives of their mistakes, their dishonesty, their small mistakes. I’ve often thought about that in recent months, when candidates around the world, and even incumbent leaders, make decisions with the sole measure of protecting themselves from what they’ve done before. Trump may have several reasons for running for a second term, a rarity in American history, and one of them may be his extreme narcissism; But the most important one right now — and for a few months now — is simply that it’s moving forward, and it also perfectly portrays the postmodern populist: Trump wants to be president because that’s the only way to be president. Prison has reduced the most influential democracy on our continent to just that: its greatest prestige, the seat of its greatest nobility, reduced to cards in the board game that allowed the player to get out of prison.

I see it everywhere: with different nuances and different intensity, the same thing 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 as soon as they open their mouths as soon as they lose the election: and that is The best incentive is 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 the same: what prevents the truly ridiculous couple from getting off their tiger is the certainty that the tiger will eat them immediately, just as Churchill said it would happen to them. is Dictators, if only for the damage they have done in power: the pain they have caused, the lives they have destroyed in front of the blind eyes of their allies (and in front of the robust nonsense of the Colombian ambassador who marched in their favor. Ortega).

The same thing happens in Brazil: Why the coup attempt in Brasilia took place, variously inspired – and even caricatured – by Jan. 6 in the Capitol in Washington, there may be more reasons than deep antipathy to Bolsonaro. For democracy, when the left has won. But everything Bolsonaro has done since, whether it’s his massive marches (with the invaluable support of evangelical superstition and mass blindness) or the vague proposal that his wife run for president, has been aimed at assuring impunity. Guaranteed, in other words, you will never be judged. Judged for what? for an attempted coup 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 colleagues that they won’t go to jail either. And with good reason, of course: because it was one of his closest colleagues, Lieutenant Mauro Seid, who was tired of his four months in prison and decided to speak out. And what he said has Bolsonaro where it belongs: in 135 pages of serious, credible and dangerous judicial indictment. Of course, dangerous for him.

Power for what? Dario Echandia famously asked after Guyton’s assassination. For him, they will call him Bolsonaro or Trump: for salvation. The problem is what societies pay when they hold their leaders hostage to their crimes: they pay first for the excesses of those leaders, and then they pay for what the leaders must have done to avoid the consequences of their excesses. That’s how we Colombians were – we are, I mean – for years. Much of the politics of recent years has or has not been done with a single horizon in mind: protecting Uribe. And this is how we all saw ourselves, holding one man’s destiny hostage, choosing prosecutors and approving laws and sabotaging peace processes that could change the lives of millions, all with the sole purpose of not having to deal with a former president. with justice. “They put the finger on Uribe and this country burned,” Francisco Santos quipped in 2014. We have been at this for ten years. And we continue: “If they touch Petro, they touch us all,” said Gustavo Bolivar with his teenage gang rhetoric.

And that’s worrying because Petro often makes mistakes, and he’s already shown his way of moving chips to cover up his mistakes. Benedetti’s appointment to a position that did not exist is so transparent in its intent, and so blatant, that it is not necessary to comment on it again, at least not to say what many have already said. It is the same as always: our democracy, our taxes, our diplomacy in many places, the stability we have not known for years: everything is put in place to cover the gaps left by mistakes, dishonesty, slips big or small. And what is now will be hereafter. I am already beginning to enumerate the mistakes that Buccele and Mille will make out of clumsiness or incompetence or intoxicated energy, and which will later lead to new excesses designed to cover or correct or save them from old mistakes. We are captives to all that, I thought these days, or our democracy is, and we don’t see how we can free ourselves.

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