The day God speaks

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 60 years after his murder
By Sentido Común

Thursday 10 April 2008 14:30 COT

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An engraving in a COP$1,000 banknote with Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s image

Colombia is one of the world’s most violent countries, and has paid a burdensome price in dead, orphanhood, widowhood, pain, and human misery. Amidst this turmoil of blood, some extraordinary events manage to break sometimes the usual collective silence of a people increasingly used to protest in private.

On 9 April 1948, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s murder, and the violence this crime unleashed, divided Colombian history. The disappearance of the caudillo, who at the time represented the vindication of popular wishes, increased even more the gap between rich and poor people, leaving on the latter an indelible mark of political dissatisfaction, frustration and impotence, reflected in modern times through electoral abstention.

Damages, fires, and looting resulting from the so-called Bogotazo, which were about to destroy Colombia’s capital city, were the physical manifestation of the rage in the heart of a flushed people. The life of the one who preached peace and social justice, the one who had lead the Silent March, was brutally and inexplicably cut by criminal shots, an event which became the start of an endless series of assassinations, political attempts, massacres, attacks and disappearances of people, many of them unresolved until today. Violence spawns violence.

Sixty years later, 4 February 2008, another event which, without exaggeration, could also divide the history of Colombian civil society, happened. The 4-F would be something like an awakening. Massively and worldwide, we Colombians went out to the streets to express our contempt to the historical violence, embodied in a good way in the surge, development, and deviation of the guerrilla movement self-denominated FARC-EP, an initial product from the social differences and the intolerant Colombian idiosyncrasy.

Supported by almost everyone in Colombian society, including the Government, and with the main opposition force incredibly excluded (leftist Alternative Democratic Pole party, PDA), the 4 February march becomes, by far, the most plentiful proof of a peaceful protest this country had ever seen. The sentiment of pain for the victims of kidnappings and murders came first, above the harsh political speeches or the presidential speech broadcast from Valledupar that evening.

As the Government tried to fish Álvaro Uribe’s second re-election in troubled waters and the Colombian left self-recriminated on its wrong step, the forcefulness of that apolitical, peaceful act remained up in the air as a tacit veto for war. All wars indeed, because we the common people demand peace.

But if the people is better than its leaders, as Gaitán himself used to say, the games of power are higher than the people’s will. There will be always Chávezes and Uribes willing to desecrate the mythical and imaginary popular command, strengthening and keeping the statu quo, along with their particular hegemonies.

An evidence of that is that, as the images of the 4-F demonstration had by no means vanished, the Uribe administration invaded Ecuadorian soil to apply the death penalty to a FARC’s fat fish, an inhuman action not considered in none of both countries’ legislation; the immediate reaction of the Ecuadorian president, orchestrated and increased by the Venezuela president, was to grant the title of "hero" to the bombed guerrilla commander, a prominent member of the organization whose criminal and terrorist conduct was put to evidence to the world by the Colombian people some weeks before, a group Ecuador and Venezuela seem to cover. Immediately afterwards, the guerrilla commander released unilaterally (with hundreds of henchmen) for "State reasons", Rodrigo Granda, warned in an insane, cynical communiqué that FARC would not agree a release of the hostages they keep if there was not a new release of their prisoners, already offered by Uribe, and a new safe haven, ignoring the 4-F demonstration, which, obviously, they have not referred to. Where do we, the marchers who don’t share none of these actions, remain?

A popular revolt in 1948, a peaceful march sixty years later. And politics remains as the rake sweeping the aspirations of men and women who only wish to live in peace, above the soil we happened to be born. How wrong was Hesiod when he sentenced that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” God is mute.

Tags: Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Bogotazo, civil society, Colombian people, Colombian politics, FARC, guerrilla, Hugo Chávez, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, peace, protest, Raúl Reyes, Rodrigo Granda, terrorism, violence