- Mercosur Will Send A Mission To Colombia To Guarantee The Transparency Of The Elections
 |
| Firm supporters of the coalition during an event of the electoral campaign of Gustavo Pedro's party. |
One morning in August 2001, more than 20 years ago, I was waiting for the arrival of a boat scheduled to take a team of Doctors Without Borders to a village on the Magdalena River that had been badly hit by the fighting, where they had to treat hundreds of displaced civilians. sick or infected with malaria. In the previous two hours, the jeep in which we were traveling had been intercepted and searched by soldiers from the regular army and by two different groups of paramilitaries.
Now he was observing the arrival by boat of a group of guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) at a command post of the National Liberation Army (ELN). We were in one of the most conflictive areas of the country where the two anti-government groups respected and tolerated each other.
A peasant, noticing my surprised face, told me with a certain snarl: "What a cool (prettier) landscape, right." I told him that I was shocked by the number of troops I had seen in just a few kilometers. "How do you manage to survive among so many weapons?" I asked him. "Well, you haven't seen the drug traffickers who are the ones who really rule here," he replied with a mocking smile.
The peasant then began a story full of literary pearls despite his illiteracy. He told me that he had just sold a few bunches of bananas in Barrancabermeja, one of the most violent cities in Colombia. He had been traveling for two days and his earnings barely exceeded 4,000 pesos, two dollars at the time.
One of her children was sick and she had not found the right medicine to start treatment. One of the nurses ended up giving him some malaria pills and painkillers. Shortly before leaving on a cracked barge, he confessed to me that "starting today I'm going to plant coca leaves because they come to buy it at my door, and that way I won't see my family sick."
The peasant also told me that his wife was going to give him "a rant", that is, she was going to scold him because she would think that with the rest of the money he had "enguayabado" (had a few good drinks), accompanied by "a fritanga", and then he had dedicated himself to "gallinacear" (looking for an amorous conquest) during his one-night stay in the regional capital.
I didn't know the meaning of some of the words, but one of the Colombian members of the medical mission helped me understand them. I was thinking as I watched him walk away. He had used Spanish as he had rarely heard. I had been traveling through Colombia for more than a decade and I had always been surprised by the cadence and elegance of how the poorest peasants spoke in our language. But that man had dazzled me from the first minute.
Years later, in 2009, I wrote several articles about then-President Álvaro Uribe. I found three words that broke records in Google when they accompanied Uribe: paramilitarism, drug trafficker, and murderer. There were millions of entries, many of them pure hogwash. But in some, they accused him of very serious links with drug trafficking and paramilitarism. And in others, the former president appeared to face his detractors with an undiplomatic and tacky style, with dialectical descent into the mud or pure threats.
Some audios that you listened to then gave off a disturbing tension and vulgarity. I will not forget the confrontation of more than ten minutes with the journalist
Daniel Coronell on Colombian radio. The presenter read the president at the beginning of a journalist's column: "Every time someone dares to remove the president's past, he appeals to the same strategy. He flies into a rage and calls the station of his preferences. He makes signs to criminalize those who investigate. He explains exactly what no one has asked him, evades the substantive issues, and guarantees a new period of silence on the subject".
Uribe, beside himself, commented live that he would like to hear the journalist's own accusations. "We are calling him," the presenter replied. "That he has civic value, that he appears on the air, that he is a journalist who has lied to the country on many occasions," Uribe intervened again, raising his voice.
While they waited for the connection with the journalist, the presenter reminded the president that Coronell included in his article information that appeared in the local Medellín newspaper during the assassination of Uribe's father, which occurred a quarter of a century ago, in June 1983. "In that chronicle explained that you traveled to the farm where your father was killed and your brother was injured in a drug trafficker Pablo Escobar's helicopter," the host of the program read to him. Already live there were several exchanges of serious accusations and insults between the president and the journalist.
In communications legally intercepted by court order for his multiple complaints, former President Uribe usually uses the "jetabulario", which is how the use of profanity or insults is designated while arguing with a former collaborator: "I'm very perraco with you and I hope they record this call too", he shouts and insists: "If I see him, I'm going to hit him in the face, queer".
A competitor of Uribe is the current right-wing candidate Rodolfo Hernández, former mayor of Bucaramanga, who has had a dizzying rise of seven points in the polls in the last two weeks. Some analysts predict that he could overtake the right-wing incumbent candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, to finish second and go through to the second round with a chance of winning a highly polarized election.
This candidate for the presidency of Colombia, who calls himself "The Engineer" is, without a doubt, the king of the "jetabulario" and, in addition, he is prosecuted for corruption. In some conversations recorded by people who are dissatisfied with joint ventures, pearls such as the following can be heard: "Don't believe me so loud, you're a jerk"; "Malparido, you have not done an ass in life but to fuck those who work"; "We see each other as machos, son of a bitch, back in your apartment if you want"; "If you keep fucking with me, I'll shoot you, bastard."
The world is upside down in Colombia. Illiterate peasants who make you enjoy with their expressiveness and musicality. Powerful businessmen, former presidents, or arrogant candidates converting the use of language into a quagmire of vulgar and inappropriate expressions that subvert and impoverish it.