It is logical that many Colombians feel offended (mainly annoyed) at the fatalistic predictions made by Venezuelans for the victory of Gustavo Petro. What do they think, apart from coming to Colombia in hundreds of thousands, with all the challenges that this implies for public administration, they come to pontificate. But understand us, the catastrophe that the famous “Bolivarian revolution” has left us has been such that Venezuelans no longer have a sense of smell and everything that sounds, seemsor smells left, paralyzes us with panic (first) and fills us with rage (shortly after).
(Read here: Relationship with the Police and the military, a sensitive issue that Petro will have to face)
With raw flesh after this last-degree burn, we go around the world – already six million of us – trying to warn anyone that what was sold to us as “the left”, as change, as renewal and fresh air, was a mass of lies, corruption, misery and deinstitutionalization. It is clear that this does not happen or will happen to everyone, but for us it is almost a moral obligation to warn it, more so if it is Colombia.
(Read here: Elections 2022: The forgotten of the electoral campaign in Colombia)
Colombia is for Venezuelans more than the refuge of millions of us vomited by poverty. Colombia has become the desideratum of the country that we could have been if we had not been touched by this colossal fire of people who said they were “leftist” and were a cartel of bandits and drug traffickers. With its ups and downs – who doubts it – Colombia is growing, it has quite respectable public powers, a convulsive society but in which having a job is still good for something, studying is not an absolute odyssey and water and electricity constantly arrive at the population. We lost all that and the most optimistic calculations indicate that at least 30 years of economic corrections are necessary to reach the level we had in 2012.
There were millions of you in our house and now millions of us in yours in a transfer of souls that has always mixed our destinies and our identity.
Colombia is the mirror in which we Venezuelans would see ourselves beautiful. For us, it does not have the same sense of urgency to warn Mexicans or Argentines or Chileans about our skin being scalded by “the left”, because we feel the most real and tangent brotherhood with Colombia. It was millions of you in our house and now millions of us in theirs in a movement of souls that has always mixed our destinies and our identity.
Mr. Petro also once put his finger on our sore spot in an unseemly way. It was an affront when in 2016, when the hyperinflation that still plagues us was beginning to leave skin thin, deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, and he said from a market -of the very few that were supplied at that time- that everything was fine in Venezuela. That insensitivity and automatic solidarity with the repressors that it has cost us so many lives to try to eradicate, still without success, filled us with rage (first) and now that he won the presidency of Colombia (a little later) with panic.
Can that episode (and more than one smiling photo with our dictators) judge them for choosing it? Of course not, but even if they brand us as nosy and annoying, the urgency to warn them overcomes us, that beyond the commitment to change they have made, remember to be vigilant and be every day caretakers of the democratic roots that have cost them so much to build. Take care of your votes, your newspapers, your protests, your courts, your activists, your universities, attentive to the hatred and resentment that the speeches distill, that germ of disasters… We ask you more with the terror of the frightened than with the superiority of the pontificator , because as a saying from the Balkan lands says: he who burns himself with hot milk, then blows up the yoghurt.
VALENTINA LARES MARTIZ
FOR THE TIME
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