Eduardo Verano de la Rosa
The sword is a symbol of weapons. Weapons must be at the service of law and this is an instrument of peace. If they are outside the law, it is arbitrariness and war, and war is the denial of peace and contrary to rights.
Therefore, the sword must be subject to law and at the service of rights and freedoms. This relationship between sword, law and peace was clear to our founding fathers, so much so that in the Constituent Congress of Cúcuta in 1821, Simón Bolívar in his inauguration speech as president said: “This sword can be of no use on the day of peace, and this must be the last of my power; because this is what I have sworn to myself, because I have promised it to Colombia, and because there can be no republic where the people are not sure of the exercise of their own powers.”
Bolívar had sufficient citizen education to recognize that a republic is the government of laws and that sovereignty, that is, the source of power from which the laws must emanate, is citizenship.
Strictly speaking, the source of power is not the sword but citizen reason. For this reason, in the aforementioned speech he also said: “I want to be a citizen to be free and so that everyone can be free. I prefer the title of citizen to that of Liberator because the latter emanates from war, the former emanates from the laws. Change me, Lord, all my dictates for that of a good citizen.”
Another founding father, Francisco de Paula Santander, known as the man of the laws, in the opinion of some historians in the same Congress of Cúcuta said: “Colombians, weapons have given you independence, the laws will give you freedom.” In the speech, he also said: “But, sir, since the law is the origin of all good and my obedience is the instrument of its strictest compliance, you can count on the spirit of the congress to penetrate my entire being and I will not live except for make it work.”
The spirit of the Constituent Congress of 1821, in which the founding constitutional charter of our republic was issued, is the north and part of the roots of our institutionality and in this it is stated that a government of law must reign and that the sword be at the side. service of the government of laws, therefore, obedience to laws and law is vital. This is why the sword must be in the sheath well kept and not worshiped but rather the right.
The sword kept in its sheath is a symbol of a civilized society, in which man has stopped behaving like a beast. A culture of peace is one that must be cultivated and developed under the protection of obedience to law.
The thing is that man is prone to violence. In his speech “Destiny and Mission” in the middle of the Second World War, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Thomas Mann, taught us that: “There is not the slightest danger that reason takes too much increase on earth, that on earth there may be behavior that is excessively reasonable. There is not the slightest danger that human beings will one day become angels… But it does not take much, as has been seen, for them to transform in an exaggeratedly interesting way into beasts.”
The sword, I insist, must remain in the sheath, and there is a political charter that established peace as an end in 1991, which deserves to be reviewed to correct the distribution of power in the territory in a democratic manner.