Colombia Passport

This week Colombia is remembering the most well known day of its 20th century: April 9, 1948. It was the day when the presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was assassinated. It inaugurated a era of violence and conflicts that still actual. As we are also this year preparing for the new elections of a president, I find suitable to translate some ideas of one of his celebrated speeches when Gaitán was opening his own run to the presidency in 1945.

Presentation of his political program in 1945

Almost all the social and political movements that have transformed a country or alter the history of the world, have appeared in a surprising way (…) At the contact with the lived realities; the destroyed desires; the legitimate anxieties unfulfilled; the unheard claims of justice (…) When these elements interrupt in a given moment: the heat of the pretext of exiguous appearance but deep and demolishing as a spark over the in flammable material, those who thought that they have given to their power, their dominion, their system, an appearance of indestructibility, are the first to be possessed by a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.

(…)

I do not believe in the messianic destiny of the men. I do not believe that even if a man has great individual qualities, nobody is able to get that his passions, thoughts and determinations, become the passions, thoughts and determinations of the collective soul. I do not believe that there was or there is a man able to act over the masses as the chisel of the artist (…) The leader of the great popular movements is he who has a sensibility, a plastic capacity to capture and resume in a given moment the impulse that works in the agitated subconscious of the collective soul; he who becomes an antenna to whom they ascend to look for expression, in order to return with method to the womb from which they came, with the moral demands, of the just, of the beautiful, in the legitimate human endeavor of advance to better destinies.

(…)

It is enough to proclaim that we aspire to the moral and democratic restoration of the Republic. This transparent and simple form has been understood by the people of Colombia with all the real and transcendent forces that enclosed its content. Only those who are members and speculate with the political country, cannot find in it the merits and substances, some for harmful intent and others for blindness. With solid bases the thinkers and exegetical ones of the present world, whose mission consists in organize the scattered elements of what is made the social true of a country, remind us with emphasis that the main of the problems we face now is the moral problem. When they say moral problem, they are not announcing not a vane theoretical meaning, neither a simple rule of domestic character for the coexistence among the members of the family and even a simple cleanliness in the management of the public goods. They know and we know also, that the moral, socially understood, is all those things and something more than those. When we say moral, we define the specific force of society.