With elections approaching, Colombia’s society must take ownership of the public debate and stop allowing its structurally corrupt ruling class to distort it for their personal benefit.
Colombia’s public debate has been dominated by a clash between former President Alvaro Uribe and another member of the country’s ruling class, columnist and publisher Daniel Samper, for almost a week already.
The long-lasting hostility between the former head of state and the nephew of another former head of state has been all over the papers and TV sets, resulting in a public exchange of arguments in regards to Uribe calling Samper a child molester after the latter made some mediocre joke about the daughter of a senator, in turn the granddaughter of another president.
Uribe ignores court, calls columnist ‘child molester’ and gets sued again
Common political issues like the economy, public safety and unemployment have been pushed off the public agenda to make place for what essentially is a feud between two members of rival elites, the Bogota liberals and Medellin’s hard right conservatives.
The ruling class’ kidnapping of the public agenda is no novelty. In fact, I tried to address it in a column early this year.
Sorry to distract you from Colombia’s latest faux scandal, but we have a real problem
The late Jaime Garzon, one of the country’s most revered journalists and satirists also tried to address it 20 years ago already, a year before he was assassinated in 1998.
Garzon argued that this reversed order in regards to the political and the public agenda was one of the structural problems holding the country back.
Jaime Garzon
Those words were spoken 20 years ago, but Colombian society still allows exactly the same families, in this case again the Samper and the Uribe families, to dictate the public debate and impose their will on the public.
We’re twenty years ahead and Colombia, shamefully, is having the same discussion dictated by the same families as in nineteen ninety fucking seven, the year British Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris.
Britain is a monarchy, but Colombia is a republic. Nevertheless, the public is still serving the interests of the same families who have done absolutely nothing for the good of the country or its people.
Colombia’s oil is almost up. Unemployment is rampant. It’s 2017 and children are dying of hunger because the ruling class is stealing child welfare funds. The healthcare system and the justice system are on the border of collapse. Shouldn’t politicians and prominent columnists be talking about that?
Are we going to allow Garzon having died in vain or are we going to stop the absurdity?
We must talk back to the media to stop enabling politicians to impose their agenda on that of the public and do what they are supposed to do, put the public agenda on the political agenda.
We must reject or even disrupt politicians trying to dictate what we talk about. What do we care what Uribe calls Samper or the other way around? Are their debates about our problems and challenges? Do they even correspond to our realities? I don’t think so.
Colombia can keep its hands in its pockets for another 20 years or it can assume control of its own destiny in next year’s elections. You and I must actively promote and propagate the latter.