‘All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure for ever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.’
This beautiful sentence by Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra does not refer to the Colombia of today but to his own time, of course, but in beginning this lament, he never would have dreamed it would fit us like a glove. For a ghostly synthesis of what contemporary Colombia is does not allow one to believe that Don Miguel would have said what he said, and said it so beautifully, if he had been a compatriot of ours. Two examples would have been enough to destroy his illusions: last year, close to 400,000 Colombians had to flee their houses and land because of the violence, as almost 3 million others had already done for the same reason over the previous half-century. These displacements were the embryo of another rootless country — almost as populous as Bogotá, and perhaps larger than Medellín — that wanders aimlessly within its own sphere, searching for a place to survive, with no more material wealth than the clothes on its back. The paradox is that these fugitives from themselves continue to be victims of the violence sustained by two of the most sustainable businesses in this irrational world: drug trafficking and the illegal sale of weapons.
They are primary symptoms of the groundswell that is suffocating Colombia: two countries in one, not only different but opposites in the colossal black market that sustains the drug trade in the United States and Europe and, in the long run, the entire world. For it is impossible to imagine the end of violence in Colombia without the elimination of narcotraffic, and the end of narcotraffic is unimaginable without the legalization of drugs, which become more profitable the more they are prohibited.
Four decades of every conceivable disturbance of public order have absorbed more than a generation of the marginalized with no way to live other than subversion or common criminality. The writer R. H. Moreno Durán said it with greater accuracy: ‘Without death, Colombia would give no signs of life.’ We are born suspicious and die guilty. For years, peace talks — with minimal but memorable exceptions — have ended in blood talks. For any international matter, from innocent tourist travel to the simple act of buying or selling, we Colombians have to begin by demonstrating our innocence.
In any case, the political and social atmosphere was never conducive to the peaceful homeland our grandparents dreamed of. It succumbed early to a system of inequalities, to a confessional education, a rockbound feudalism, and a deep-rooted centralism, with a remote, self-absorbed capital in the clouds and two eternal parties, at once enemies and accomplices, bloody, crooked elections, and an entire saga of governments without a people. So much ambition could be sustained only by twenty-nine civil wars and three military coups between the two parties, in a social broth that seemed anticipated by the devil for today’s misfortunes in an oppressed nation that in the midst of so many misfortunes has learned to be happy without happiness, and even in spite of it.
And so we have reached a point that barely allows us to survive, but there are still some puerile souls who look to the United States as a polestar of salvation with the certainty that in our country we have used up even the sighs to die in peace. However, what they find there is a blind empire that no longer considers Colombia a good neighbour, or even a cheap, trustworthy accomplice, but only another target for its imperial voracity.
Two natural gifts have helped us avoid the empty spaces in our cultural predicament, grope for an identity, and find the truth in the fogs of uncertainty. One is the gift of creativity. The other is a raging personal determination to move up. From our very origins, both virtues nourished the natives’ providential shrewdness which was used against the Spanish from the day they disembarked. The conquerors, dazzled by novels of chivalry, were beguiled by dreams of fantastic cities built of pure gold or the legend of a king covered in gold swimming in lagoons of emeralds. Masterpieces of a creative imagination intensified by magical means to survive the invader.
Some 5 million Colombians who live abroad today, fleeing from native misfortunes with no other weapons or shields than their temerity or ingenuity, have demonstrated that this prehistoric cunning is still alive in us, allowing us to survive by hook or by crook. The virtue that saves us is that, by the grace and works of our creative imaginations, we do not allow ourselves to die of hunger, for we have known how to be fakirs in India, English teachers in New York, or camel drivers in the Sahara. As I have tried to show in some of my books — if not in all of them — I trust more in these absurdities of reality than in theoretical dreams that most of the time serve only to muzzle a bad conscience. That is why I believe we still have a deeper country to discover in the midst of disaster: a secret Colombia that no longer fits in the moulds we had forged for ourselves with our historical follies.
It is not, therefore, surprising that we should begin to glimpse an apotheosis of artistic creativity among Colombians and to effect the country’s good health with a definitive awareness of who we are and what we’re good for. I believe Colombia is learning to survive with an indestructible faith, whose greatest merit is being more fruitful the more it encounters adversity. Historical violence forced it to decentralize, but it can still reunite with its own greatness through the work and grace of its misfortunes. Experiencing that miracle in the deepest way will allow us to know with certainty and forever in what country we were born and to continue between two opposing realities without dying. This is why I am not surprised that, in these days of historical disasters, the good health of the country should prosper with a new awareness. Popular wisdom is making its way, and we aren’t waiting for it sitting in the doorway of the house but in the middle of the street, perhaps without the country itself realizing that we are going to overcome everything and find its salvation even where it had never been sought before.
No occasion seemed more auspicious than this one for me to leave the eternal, nostalgic clandestinity of my study and stitch together these ramblings for the two hundredth anniversary of the University of Antioquia, which we celebrate now as a historical date that belongs to everyone. An auspicious occasion to begin again at the beginning and love as never before the country we deserve so that it will deserve us. If only for that reason, I would dare to believe that the dream of Don Miguel de Cervantes is now at the right point for us to glimpse the dawn of a calmer time, that the evil that overwhelms us will last much less time than the good, and that on our boundless creativity alone depends knowing now which of the many roads are the right ones, in order to experience them in the peace of the living and enjoy them by right and for ever more.
Amen.