A little-known speech by the Colombian Nobel Prize for Literature on the meaning of loving Colombia, which becomes more valid in these days of national upheaval.
“All the storms that happen to us are signs that time will soon calm down and things will happen to us well, since it is not possible that the bad or the good are durable, and from here it follows that the bad has lasted a long time , the good is already near ”. (We recommend: Read more about the United Colombia special. Entrepreneurs and their country bets).
This beautiful sentence of Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra does not refer to today’s Colombia, but to his own time, of course, but we would never have dreamed that it would come to us like a glove to try these laments, as a spectral synthesis of what is the Colombia of today allows us to believe that Don Miguel would have said what he said, and with such beauty, if he were a compatriot of our days. Two examples would have been enough to derail their illusions: last year, nearly four hundred thousand Colombians had to flee their homes and plots due to violence, as nearly three million had already done for the same reason for half a century. These displaced persons were the embryo of another country on the loose – almost as populous as Bogotá and perhaps larger than Medellín – that wanders aimlessly within its own realm in search of a place to survive, with no material wealth other than the clothes it is wearing. . The paradox is that those fugitives from themselves continue to be victims of violence sustained by two of the most profitable businesses in this heartless world: drug trafficking and the illegal sale of weapons.
They are primary symptoms of the deep sea that suffocates Colombia: two countries in one, not only different but opposite in a colossal black market that sustains the trade of drugs to dream in the United States and Europe, and ultimately in the world. whole. Well, it is not possible to imagine the end of violence in Colombia without the elimination of drug trafficking, and the end of drug trafficking is not imaginable without the legalization of drugs, the more prosperous each moment the more prohibited.
Four decades of all kinds of disturbances of public order have absorbed more than one generation of marginalized without a way of life other than subversion or common crime. The writer Moreno Durán said it more accurately: “Without death, Colombia would not show signs of life.” We are born suspicious and we die guilty. The peace talks – with minor but memorable exceptions – have for years ended in blood talks. For any international matter, from an innocent tourist trip to the simple act of buying or selling, we Colombians have to start by proving our innocence.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsIn any case, the political and social environment was never the best for the homeland of peace that our grandparents dreamed of. It succumbed early in a regime of inequalities, in a confessional education, a rock feudalism and a rooted centralism, in a capital between clouds, remote and self-absorbed, with two eternal parties at once enemies and accomplices, and bloody and manipulated elections, and all a rear of governments without a people. Such ambition could only be sustained with twenty-nine civil wars and three coups of barracks between the two parties, in a social soup that seemed planned by the devil for the misfortunes of today in an oppressed homeland that in the midst of so many misfortunes has learned to be happy without happiness, and even against it.
Thus we have reached a point that barely allows us to survive, but there are still childish souls who look to the United States as a north of salvation, with the certainty that in our country even their sighs have been exhausted to die in peace. However, what they find there is a blind empire that no longer considers Colombia as a good neighbor, not even as a cheap and reliable accomplice, but as one more space for its imperial voracity.
Two natural gifts have helped us to overcome the gaps in our cultural condition, to grope for an identity and to find the truth in the mists of uncertainty. One is the gift of creativity. The other is a sweeping determination for personal advancement. Both virtues fed from our origins the providential cunning of the natives against the Spaniards from the day of the landing. Some five million Colombians who today live abroad fleeing native misfortunes, with no weapons or shields other than their recklessness or ingenuity, have shown that those prehistoric malice are still alive within us, for good or bad reasons to survive. . The virtue that saves us is that we do not let ourselves starve to death by the creative imagination, because we have known how to be fakirs in India, English teachers in New York or camel drivers in the Sahara. As I have tried to show in some of my books – if not all – I trust these nonsense of reality more than I do theoretical dreams that most of the time only serve to muzzle a bad conscience. That is why I believe that we still have a deep country to discover in the midst of the disaster: a secret Colombia that no longer fits into the molds that we had forged with our historical blunders.
It is therefore not surprising that we began to glimpse an apotheosis of the artistic creativity of Colombians, and to realize the good health of the country with a definite awareness of who we are and what we serve. I believe that Colombia is learning to survive with an indestructible faith whose greater merit is to be more fruitful the more adverse it is. It was forcibly decentralized by historical violence, but it can still be restored to its own greatness through its misfortunes. Living this miracle thoroughly will allow us to know for sure and forever in which country we were born and to continue without dying between two opposing realities. That is why it does not surprise me that in these times of historic disasters the good health of the country thrives more with a new conscience. Popular wisdom is reassessed and we do not wait for it sitting at the door of the house but for it in the middle of the street, perhaps without the country itself realizing that we are going to overcome everything and find its salvation where it was not.
No occasion seemed as propitious as this to get out of the eternal and nostalgic secrecy of my study and string together these ramblings about the two hundred years of the University of Antioquia, which we now celebrate as a historic date for all of us. A propitious occasion to start again at the beginning and to love like never the country that we deserve so that it deserves us. Well, if it were only for that, I would dare to believe that the illusion of Don Miguel de Cervantes is now in its propitious season to glimpse the dawn of serene time, that the evil that overwhelms us must last much less than the good, and that only It is up to our inexhaustible creativity to distinguish now which of the many murky paths are true, to live them in the peace of the living and enjoy them with our own right and forever and ever.
So be it.
* Read on May 18, 2003 in commemoration of the 200 years of the Antioquia University.
