In the film oldboy, by Park Chan-wook, the protagonist is kidnapped and locked in a cubicle with no windows, no sunlight. He doesn't know who did it or why. He remains there, without days or nights, for 15 years. When he leaves, he discovers that the atrocity to which he was subjected was the execution of revenge. There were times when things were resolved Old Boy: You killed my mother, I took revenge by killing yours. Later, revenge was replaced by justice, that attempt to prevent us from suffering an injustice with a worse one, which allowed, for example, that the genocidaires of the Argentine dictatorship were not tortured or thrown alive from airplanes, as they did with thousands , but subjected to trials in which they could defend themselves, and that, once sentenced, they were not hooded and locked in a basement but taken to more or less common prisons. Juan Diego Quesada published in EL PAÍS a story about the Terrorism Confinement Center of El Salvador (CECOT), a maximum security prison, the pride of President Bukele who boasts of having put an end to the gangs – an evil body that eats and produces suffering—in less than two years. Many of the gang members who formed them are in the CECOT. There, Quesada says, there is no sunlight. The artificial light is on 24 hours a day. Prisoners leave their cells only 30 minutes a day, with shackles. They cannot receive visits or calls. There are two toilets per ward. The sentences reach 700 years. Does one more hole, of the many that humanity has spawned on earth, offer reparation to the families of the victims, or is it the manifestation of a State that does not seek to do justice but to exact revenge? This month, Bukele was re-elected with, it seems, 85% of the votes. The formula “massive support/thirst for revenge” has various expressions in Latin America, and possibly drags it into its darkest hour.
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#Bukele #Time #revenge