By Cecilia Orozco Tascón, EL ESPECTADOR, June 1, 2022
https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/columnistas/cecilia-orozco-tascon/el-uribismo-muda-de-piel/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
What could Duque have been thinking when, dramatically disconnected from reality, as is usual with him, he said, while enjoying London instead of attending to the high level of tension in this country, “if I had been able to run again, I’m sure I would be in the fight and would be re-elected . . “? He doesn’t feel a speck of shame? He puts the blame for the loss on his candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, whom he helped to scuttle every time he tried to support him, while contravening the neutrality that, as Head of State, he was bound to respect? Will he figure out that the social disaster left by his administration is one of the factors that set the stage for Petro’s triumph and, above all, that of a buffoon—Rodolfo Hernández—illiterate in governmental affairs, whose humor, for his nearly six million voters, consists in yelling vulgarities and slapping people, like any street corner punk that you run across?
What can Uribe, the ex-emperor, be thinking as he witnesses his own political death agony and, with that, the finite nature of his single-person movement as it comes to naught as a party? Have they been able to sleep since last Sunday, the arrogant Cabal, the dreaded Holguín, the defiant José Obdulio Gaviria, creator of the big lie, “the Uribism doctrine”, overqualified as “the ideologue”, the same one who called people displaced by the internal conflict “migrants”, which conflict, according to him, has never existed in the “Switzerland” of our Colombia?
Certainly, Duque, Uribe, Cabal, Holguín, J. O. Gaviria and the other voices of far-right extremism have neither remorse nor reflections about the election development, the earthquake, rather, that just pulled out from the Presidential race, for the first time, the candidate of the political establishment, of the bulk of big business and the upper social classes. They have no conscience, and their conduct is guided by the pragmatism that leads them to act in order for their power to survive, whatever it costs; so if they have to kneel before their new “savior”, the comedian Hernández, who will accommodate them; of that there can be no doubt.
The Uribism of the elite has no spleen: we lost a battle, but not the war, their leaders will assure.
Like the snakes that shed their skin when their scales begin to bother them, they will accommodate to Hernández as they did to Gutiérrez, to Óscar Iván Zuluaga before, and to Senator Cabal before that. She was the most popular of their ilk when the Czar of them all said that “the base” of the Democratic Center Party, made up of its 600,000 militants, would choose, through a poll, who should represent them in the elections on May 29. We aren’t talking about several elections, just this one, the one in 2022. At the end of 2021, barely six months ago, a winner was declared after a mysterious internal poll, the methodology and results of which nobody ever found out. When Zuluaga won, the eternal Uribist aspirant to the Presidency, in spite of his evident popularity among the far right, it was Sra. Cabal who protested, and she was right, because they took away her place. After the legislative elections on March 13, Zuluaga quit in less than 24 hours, and in a jiffy they grabbed onto Gutiérrez after Uribe whispered what they would have to do. Nevertheless, the lord of the haciendas pushed his followers, a week later, to answer a series of questions prepared by a committee made up of, among others, Miguel Uribe, Paloma Valencia, and the horse wrangler of Casanare, Alirio Barrera, as wild as Hernández, but with a touch of a conqueror of the Marlboro plains. One of the first questions was about which of the candidates from other sectors might be able to unite the party so as to “obtain agreements that would get them to the runoff where they could beat Gustavo Petro”. Among those mentioned were Federico Gutiérrez who had just won the consultation for Colombia’s Team, and Rodolfo Hernández. There was no need to wait. Uribe had already decided to take his big combination to power with an Antioquia campaign. But he no sooner learned the results last Sunday, in which the populist from Santander flattened the former Mayor of Medellín, Cabal, J.O.Gaviria, and Francisco Santos, among others, tweeted about “their” new candidate, Hernández. So as not to permit the loss of their official plunder, anybody would do in the President’s Palace, even a vulgarian from the lowest level of society.