By Francisco Gutiérrez Sanin, EL ESPECTADOR, December 5, 2024
https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/columnistas/francisco-gutierrez-sanin/cuentas-claras/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Polo Polo is a dismal fellow. A buffoon yes, but a villainous, loud, cruel buffoon. You want to avoid mentioning him; there are so many other serious and interesting subjects that merit our attention. But precisely because it’s not just about his old tricks, but with some much more far-reaching implications, I have to do it while I’m trying to contain the retrograde movements of my peristaltic system.
As we know, this personage played the lead in an embarrassing spectacle, assaulting the Mothers of Soacha. Then he tried to cover it with this fig leaf: the computation by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and the “left” are in error. That was the real motive for his assault. Which deserves two commentaries about those two fundamental problems.
The first is the computations. For many reasons, the evaluations of the quantitative estimates have to be continued permanently. Those of us who have been working on these subjects know that they are objectively difficult. Certainly, there could be sources of overestimation. Sources of underestimation could also be very significant. For instance, when they were talking about people that have disappeared and they gave statistics of 50 and even 80 thousand, the negotiators screamed to high heaven and talked about real and imagined mistakes in those calculations. Finally, the Truth Commission put Patrick Ball in charge of carrying out a serious quantitative effort, and the estimate turned out to be more than 100 thousand. Therefore, with regard to the wrongly named “false positives”, I agree with Polo Polo’s true Party, that means the Democratic Center Party: there might not be 6,400. It must be far more than that. But this first statistic is a reference we can hang onto, based on the evidence that we have; it’s not just “an opinion” as stated by their Great Leader with his toxic disdain.
That takes me to the second issue. For obvious biological reasons, in many cultures the mother figure invokes respect, care, and attention. That’s something that’s particularly strong in our own culture. Polo Polo, his party, the Democratic Center Party, and their puppets have violated a basic rule, a model that is simple, powerful, and easy to understand for every one of us: you don’t play games with a mother’s pain. But that’s what Polo’s Party did and intends to keep on doing. Can it be that these people reproduce themselves through fission? Be that as it may, the point is that this is not merely a lack of basic political responsibility, it’s also an inhumanity that stupefies, but he has his reasons. Because we know that, with the evidence at hand, we know that there are thousands of victims—the possible discussion could be about how many thousands. I think there are more than 6,400 and at any moment we might find support for that foreboding—and that those victims were put together by the Colombian Army and the Uribist policy of democratic security.
The result is an indelible disgrace for our Armed Forces and a terrifying human cost. And how did The Great Leader react? By ignoring the Mothers of Soacha, with whom he never met while he was President or a political leader, and then by stigmatizing the justice system. For sure: the victim is frequently more open to a dialog, perhaps even to listen, than is the one who victimized. He also blames the soldiers who allowed themselves to be caught (all of the military ought to be warned by now about the kind of friends they have in the ranks of Polo Polo).
They must have supposed that these victims were simple collateral damage in the victorious military campaign in which The Great Leader would achieve eternal power. It wasn’t appropriate to speak of those women. Besides, they were only people from Soacha and other towns. That was their position. That’s what their position continues to be.