The statement from “Antonio García”, which we Colombians learned about in recent days, is an unbeatable thermometer of everything that has been broken in Colombia after sixty years of confrontations with those antediluvian guerrillas. In twenty implausible paragraphs, the commander flatly denies that his guerrilla has committed not to kidnap, and suggests that he will stop doing so only when his financing is assured; But the most regrettable thing is not even that, but the naturalness with which he refers to one of the most atrocious crimes, one of the most despicable, that has marked this war of ours. We no longer even have to remember that kidnapping does not exist in guerrilla language: it is called “retention for economic purposes,” one of the euphemisms that fill the dictionary where “false positives” and “collective homicides” are also found. . It is never easy to discover what comes first, the moral deterioration of a society or the deterioration of its language, but here are these pearls, symptoms of the hell to which the actors of this war have dragged us.
For the ELN commander, firmly established in his particular reality, the condemnation of the kidnapping is an invention of the media. Then the National Government came out to say that it is not going to enter into a public discussion on these issues, because “the agreements are clear and in writing,” as I read in a headline: when the obvious thing is that, if the commander of the guerrilla allows these words, it is because things are not so clear, even if they are in writing. I suppose then that it is up to civil society, whatever that may be, to find a way to respond that what the guerrilla commander says is not true: that the repudiation of the kidnapping is not an invention of the media, but one of the few things on which this disoriented society, where half has become accustomed to justifying crimes that affect only the other half, seems to more or less agree. It will be up to civil society, I repeat, to say that what the article in question calls “withholdings for economic purposes” is the same thing that the Truth Commission report calls “a death suspended in time,” and that the words of the Commission describe reality better than those of the commander.
What's more: since I'm making useless recommendations, I allow myself to recommend (I'm not sure to whom: to everyone, perhaps) the reading of that document. There it is told how the FARC guerrilla, which for years denied the impact of the kidnapping, began to recognize it after an encounter with the victims of their own horrors in a space created by that Commission that a certain Colombian right has denigrated so much. And other things are told that may be valuable for the peace negotiations that will mark next year. “Kidnapping has no expiration date,” says in that report one of the 50,000 people who have suffered from it since 1990. “Kidnapping does not end on the day of liberation. Kidnapping is a reality that becomes genetic – if you will, of the kidnapped person – and that will totally change the way they are, their way of seeing reality, of communicating.” Kidnapping is not a temporary reality: it stays forever. In that sense we say that it destroys a life. When “Antonio García” writes about his “withholdings for economic purposes,” “has he looked into the eyes of the kidnapped people?” Has he heard his words?
I don't think so, but that doesn't matter. The most striking thing about this whole matter is that this is necessary: that at this point in the party there is a debate in Colombia about the justification of a practice as unjustifiable as kidnapping; and that some point out that the guerrilla has other means of financing, not only this, as if that were what makes the kidnapping abominable; and that the same guerrilla commander clarified, after the kidnapping of the father of a soccer player, that it had been a “mistake” instead of a new case of a monstrous crime; and that a government official said a few months ago, without raising an eyebrow, without seeming to realize the ethical abysses that open beneath his words, that it is necessary to ensure sustenance for the guerrillas if we are going to ask them that they stop kidnapping; and that we are remembering that at the end of the day the guerrillas do not have the “right” to kidnap, since the rules of International Humanitarian Law prohibit it. The jurist Rodrigo Uprimny had to write an entire column a few weeks ago to prove that International Humanitarian Law does prohibit kidnapping. Many of us thanked him for the column, but the conversation itself should fill us with concern, if not shame.
However, this and other conversations are possible in Colombia, where for years there has been a radio station dedicated to kidnapping, or created for the sole purpose of allowing the devastated families of the kidnapped to send messages of affection to the kidnapped, and where There is not a single citizen who has not known this infamous crime, close or from afar. We have become accustomed to talking about a practice that destroys lives, that hurts and traumatizes, that leaves its victims marked forever. We have become accustomed to the landscape of pain, damage and suffering as background noise, even to the fact that so many words – “kidnapping” is one of them, but it is not the only one – fail to name human (or inhuman, for that matter) realities. be precise).
This is what happens in coexistence with war, which dehumanizes us in more ways than one: not only because it makes some incapable of recognizing the suffering they cause, as happens to the commander of the ELN, but because it makes something intolerable something common. for the entire society. I understand that our capacity for awareness of other people's pain is limited: otherwise we would go crazy. But sometimes you have to work your way through the words, especially when the words want to deceive or distort, and try to see the human beings the words describe. Kidnapping is inhumane, even if we call it anything else. That's the only thing you need to know. The rest is rhetoric, and we Colombians have had too much of that.
Newsletter
The analysis of current events and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox
RECEIVE THE
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and here to the channel on WhatsAppand receive all the information keys on current events in the country.
Limited time special offer
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Ways #call #crime