NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2010
'Peoples Congress' meets in Colombia
Bogotá, Colombia--On Aug. 7 a new president came to power in Colombia after winning a dubious election. It was surrounded by accusations and evidence of fraud. All sorts of media P.R. was rolled out to justify to Colombians how exactly a candidate--who wasn't by any means favored in polls--ended up winning.
As opposed to the disenchantment the social movements suffered as a result of the presidential election, that electoral farce, we're finding our own independent political path forward in a search to develop democracy.
A solid fact that surrounds the elections is that more than 50% of the public eligible to vote did not. This figure is eerily similar to the statistics of poverty. Today, less than 2% of the habitants of Bogotá are upper class while 78% remain very poor. You could easily conclude from these numbers that these elections just don't matter to the majority of people here. They know that regardless of who is elected, they will have to wake up tomorrow and push a cart around looking for scraps to sustain themselves and their families. This is the hopelessness that comes from marginalization, and a lack of leadership and social humanism.
Disillusion isn't all-pervasive. Some are beginning to organize around autonomous alternatives to official state power. This July, as a prelude to the bicentennial celebration of the beginning of the struggle for Colombia's independence, representatives of regions and communities from all over Colombia got together in Bogotá for a "People's Congress." It paralleled the official Congress and actually passed legislation. The next day 6,000 people marched on the capital in the inaugural March for Independence, the first time the Left has celebrated a national holiday outside of official channels. Similar marches happened in all the major cities.
As included in the statement called "Carta de quienes somos más para el sueño de una Colombia sin exclusión" (roughly: "We are those who dream of a Colombia without exclusion"), the conference demanded: An end to the latifundios (large estate/plantations); To confront injustice; To defeat inequality; End illiteracy and hunger; Do away with unemployment and so-called "informal" labor; Make Colombia a sovereign country where we are equal in our difference; and Start the work of building an inclusive state and government and a peaceful country.
--Leo Alcantúz
(Translated from the Spanish by Brown Douglas)
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