Total Peace or the bell to the cat

In this space, we have vehemently warned that Total Peace is an excuse to dismantle the rule of law, particularly the independence of judges. Since then, the Government has demonstrated the firmness of such a decision, since its agents do everything in their power to undermine legal certainty and, among other objectives, change Colombian criminal policy.

Peace with a small letter, as nouns that we all understand, requires putting an end to armed struggle and conflicts in society. Total Peace, despite the capital letters, does not reinforce this meaning, but exhausts it, denatures it and puts it at the service of the living forever. “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.” For this reason, the excessive use of capital letters in the communications and official documents of the national Administration are a serious indication that they lie blatantly without blushing.

In the famous novel 1984, George Orwell explains how an authoritarian state renames concepts and assigns opposite meanings to descriptions that everyone understands. The result of this ideologization of the language is called newspeak and is intended to avoid confusion that leads one to think that things are going wrong. The person responsible for proliferating newspeak is the Ministry of Truth (or propaganda), which receives the support of the Ministry of Love (or the interior) in the persecution of criminals (free thinkers).

Total Peace, with initial capital letters, has served as a Trojan horse in the legal system. This week the release of Jorge Luís Alfonso López, alias “El Gatico”, the son of the cat sentenced to twenty-nine years in prison for the murder of journalist Rafael Enrique Prins, was issued. Of course, El Gatico was not named a peace facilitator because of his deliberative skills in complex negotiations, but the judge who ordered his release does maintain that he acted with the support of orders issued directly by the government of change.

At the point of capital letters and incessant repetition, the Government assigns meanings that words in round words and without bold type do not have. This anti-democratic attitude is tantamount to shouting to be right and is a deceitful way of arguing. There can be no deliberation without sincerity and respect for the institutions of a rule of law, as the Habermasian philosophers warn.

A few days ago, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights handed down a sentence in the case of Members and Militants of the Patriotic Union versus the Republic of Colombia. In the next column we will delve into the ruling, which, although it arrives late, makes it clear that what we call democracy in this country is nothing more than a mirage, an institutional formality that does not materialize. We live against humanity and, based on capital letters and repetition, we are not going to change our national reality.