Senator María Fernanda Cabal, the right-wing denialist who erases massacres from our history, who affirms without blushing that false positives are an invention of the communists, yes, the one who dies for Bolsonaro and who was able to campaign for Donald Trump through Despite being a Colombian senator, and whom many do not take seriously because they consider her a caricature, she, Cabal, could be anointed this November 20 by former President Uribe, as the new presidential candidate of the Democratic Center.
María Fernanda Cabal is a great performer politics, even if it seems like a joke to many. He rose to fame in the networks, since in a trill, made a few hours after the death of Gabo, he sent the nobel to hell for having been close to Fidel Castro. Since then, she has been the queen of Twitter, of networks and of messages that exacerbate fears. Like the fear that a sector of the population feels about the possibility that Gustavo Petro, the most optioned leftist candidate in the polls, will win the next elections.
One by one his opponents have evaporated as if by magic. The first of them was Óscar Ivan Zuluaga, the former candidate who beat Santos in the first round in 2014. In front of Cabal, Zuluaga is a poised man, with experience, and less radical. His launch caused a stir, but time passed, and while Cabal sweeps the conversations, he insults the mamertos -The derogatory that she uses to separate the good people from the “riffraff” – and manages to be a trend almost every day with his exits from the lining, Óscar Iván Zuluaga only won the clientelist vote. The other candidate, Rafael Nieto, is a businessman too alien to realpolitik. It does not rebound, even if it has the support of Fernando Londoño, the leader of the Democratic Center who told Duque that the peace agreement had to be torn apart when he was elected four years ago. Finally, there is Paloma Valencia, granddaughter of a former president, her only merit to be in this competition. Faced with Cabal’s explosiveness, the former president’s granddaughter seems like a politician from the last century.
While her opponents are lost in the radar, María Fernanda Cabal, with her tendencies on Twitter that brighten the spirits, has been positioning herself, and even if it seems like a caricature to many, I would take her seriously. She represents a radical right that no longer wants to keep up appearances and that feels it is time to turn the page on Uribe. The former president has always taken care of the forms so then he has used them as a screen to commit abuses as happened with the executions of civilians at the hands of the military, which occurred under his government. He called his party Democratic Center despite the fact that it is neither central nor democratic, but of the right and managed by its owner as if it were his large estate.
María Fernanda, on the other hand, does not take care of the forms, she does not have filters. She is crude and direct and as a good disciple of Trump and Bolsonaro, she is fascinated by taking radical positions. Cabal is in favor of Colombians arming themselves to the teeth, he asks that protests such as those that took place in recent months be repressed not by the police or by the anti-riot squads, but by the Army. According to her, the protest is a hoax manufactured by the guerrillas and financed by drug trafficking that must be repressed by an army with all its lethal force.
Cabal also denies the dispossession suffered by thousands of peasants who were displaced from their lands by the conflict. For Cabal there was never a conflict in Colombia and that is why he has tried several times, from Congress, to put an end to the land restitution law that was approved in the Santos government, and that returns their lands to the peasants. He has no problem saying that he does not know the legitimacy of the peace agreement, because the agreement was not endorsed at the polls. And, like Duque, he does not try to gild the pill on the issue of the implementation of peace to look good with international agencies. She does not like to be stigmatized and is annoyed when they point out that she supports paramilitary ideology, but she is the queen of stigma in her speeches. Her world is binary and she represents good people, and the rest of us who do not agree with her precepts are mamertos. That is, we are dangerous because we do not think like her.
Thus, little by little, it is that María Fernanda is conquering Uribe’s heart so that the finger falls on her. In an audio that is circulating on the networks, a guy is heard saying that if Uribe says that María Fernanda Cabal is the only option to stop Gustavo Petro, then he votes for her. What the fuck.
The problem is that Uribe’s finger no longer has the same magic as before when it was enough for the anointed to reach the presidency with one shot without much effort. Today the power of the former president is in decline and if María Fernanda is chosen, she will have to work hard. According to the polls, people are tired of Uribism, of its denials, of its attempts to destroy the peace agreement. Uribe is also facing a criminal process for witness tampering that has him in the eye of the hurricane and that removed him from Congress. Anointing a candidate as radical as María Fernanda at a time when uribism is so in the doldrums could be suicide.
However, do not underestimate the power of perform mer by María Fernanda Cabal, nor Uribe’s ability to be reborn from the ashes. She wants to prove that the fear of Petro in Colombia is much greater than the thirst for change. In that crusade walks the fearsome María Fernanda Cabal.
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