The head of state, at the close of the official visit of the president of the United Mexican States, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, referred to the democratic struggles that Colombia has waged and explained that the elites do not like democracy.
President Gustavo Petro urged us to remember the main historical deeds of Colombia’s republican life that led to the consolidation of its democracy.
In his speech at the closing of the official visit of the president of the United Mexican States in the city of Cali, the president made a historical tour, from the struggles of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, the general of the liberating army José María Melo, the only indigenous president that Colombia, ‘Che Guevara’ and Benito Juárez have had in Mexico, among others.
When speaking about General Melo, the Colombian president said that the liberating army “obviously did not like those who had a vision of elite and exclusion in Colombian society: the slave owners who governed Colombia until 1850, and their descendants. “They still want to continue governing.”
President Petro recalled that those Creole elites banished General Melo, who went to defend Nicaragua and El Salvador and later defended Benito Juárez’s ideas in Mexico of building a deep democracy.
“There he was shot and there he is buried, but no one in Colombia fought again to bring his body, or they don’t like the story of an indigenous President.
They don’t like that our Vice President (Francia Márquez) is black, and they don’t like that the President has been an insurgent. They simply don’t like the people to govern, that’s all: they don’t like democracy,” she stated.
All of these, he added, “are struggles for democracy that must be recovered, because recovering history is recovering the present and the future.”
He also referred to the case of General Rafael Uribe Uribe, who was murdered for defending public education in the country.
“Rafael Uribe’s sin at that time for being murdered was having fought for public education throughout the republic of Colombia. Today, precisely, someone is proposing to end public education so that public vouchers are not provided for boys and girls to study in private schools, which is an attack on public education that this Government plans to strengthen, not end.
The Colombian president, when speaking to the president of the United Mexican States, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who concluded his official visit to Colombia this Saturday, said that, just as in our common past, “today we have no borders, we are the same people with similar problems in an intense diversity and with an enormous capacity to build beauty.”
That beauty, explained the head of state, is in the Latin American boom with Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda, and so many other writers from all our countries.
“Now I try to look at the new emanations of our literature and I find the same boom in another format and invisibly… a little foreign to us but absolutely poetic and as deep and intense as the Latin American writing boom was.”
And he concluded that there are other values that must be restored in these lands, such as real freedom, deep democracy, “that there be indigenous and black presidents again.”
