A friend, an economist of great importance, told me a long time ago the anecdote of two of his colleagues who happened to meet at the voting table. After a moment of embarrassment, one whispers to the other, “If you don’t tell anyone, neither will I.” The joke is only immediately funny to those who understand, as an economist understands, that the act of voting the most wasteful thing in the world is: It causes us enormous costs that don’t even come close to matching the benefits, since the time and energy we invest in the voting and electoral process has no appreciable benefit to the individual, nor does it bring any immediate benefit or some tangible compensation beyond the hidden satisfaction of having fulfilled a civic duty. Furthermore, if the task of voting comes with other burdens – corruption, violence, social erosion – it may not be illegal to ask ourselves from time to time why we continue to do so.
At least I’ve been wondering these days, now that Colombia is about to vote in the most tense and tense election of my adult life: Why are people voting? Corruption is still there: Before every important election, we Colombians rediscover that votes are bought in the country, the business is sometimes very sophisticated, and footage of politicians negotiating positions for votes or exchanging votes for money and sometimes complaining about it , how expensive votes are these days: the equivalent of 12 euros each, where do we end up. On the other hand, the violence is still there: it has always been part of the democratic process, and I’m not just talking about the recent history of paramilitarism and the guerrilla dictating the votes of an entire community, but also our long tradition of political attacks. The extreme right has eliminated whoever it wanted, sometimes entire parties and sometimes with proven state collusion, and the extreme left has resorted to kidnapping and terrorism in this degraded war that the peace accords define (and continue to address). .
What is bleak is the realization—those of us who have the misfortune of memory or the useless habit of leafing through old newspapers—how little things have changed over time. In a 1981 column, García Márquez wrote of the “passionate polarization” the country was experiencing on the eve of the elections, continuing, not without irony: “For as long as I can remember, I have not seen the country in a state of exhaustion like this one, showing all the signs of a final crossroads. What we need is not a president like so many others, but a providential savior. We’ve never been worse.” Perhaps that was our worst problem: the belief, repeated every four years, that we were never worse. But maybe it’s a national tradition: at the end of the 19th century, the Conservative Party proclaimed the dilemma in doom-and-doom tones: ” Regeneration or catastrophe.” And a little over a century later, Messianic President Álvaro Uribe did something similar, in the midst of a second term won by grotesque tricks, when asked for a second re-election he replied: “Only if there is a hecatomb .”
For as long as I can remember, this disjointed country has been in the same situation, going to the polls with the impression of imminent catastrophe or hecatomb fueled by the politicians’ apocalyptic discourse, or with the confused resignation of voting under threat or coercion: by the guerrilla, by the paramilitaries, from drug terrorism. The most peaceful elections we remember today took place four years ago, when a president and ruling party were elected that immediately set about delegitimizing the peace accords: the very peace accords that had made possible or facilitated those peaceful elections. And the well-armed fears of the Uribe right-wing were planning for these elections as well: the possibility of becoming the new Venezuela or descending into something called Castrochavism. They were orchestrated fears, very similar to those organized by the campaign against the peace accords ahead of the 2016 referendum. Right-wing spokesmen said at the time approving the accords meant handing the country over to the guerrillas, establishing socialism in Colombia and even Destroy the Christian family (sic). And amid these fears, the country voted.
Allow me a confession here: I have never voted for the winner of an election. The only time the candidate of my choice won, in 2014, reasons of force majeure prevented me from voting. Besides, I’ve never been as lucky as others to see the country I would have liked to represent with the most popular candidate or the one with the most votes. But not all defeats are the same. The one that hurt me the most happened in 2006, when the Colombian constitution was reformed by bought votes, allowing Álvaro Uribe, whose excesses some of us had already denounced, to triple the number of votes for my candidate, Carlos Gaviria: one of the decent men who have guided you through Colombian politics. I knew then that the country had missed an unrepeatable opportunity: to bring to power a true social democrat, a man capable of governing for everyone, not just his own, and allergic to all violence, not only against those of others. But Gaviria – academic, humanist, a man incapable of small or large corruption – represented values that tend to be obstacles in my political country.
And so it has been for us: the happiness we deserve. And so the question crossing this column doesn’t strike me as too absurd or outrageous. Of course, I don’t know exactly why people vote, but I’m aware that there are still many who vote for money (the 12 euros they get for lunch that day) or for various fears, sometimes justified or justified. For the rest of us, those of us who are oddly lucky enough to have free choice, voting can be many things: a form of rejection, condemnation and punishment, or sometimes, if we’re lucky, a defense of a particular model of society that we are closer to want to come; but in any case voting will always be a sublimated form of opinion, and in a country’s opinions there are both reasons and emotions, or both passions and irrationality.
Contrary to what many have predicted so many times, my country has never exploded into a thousand pieces, but neither can it be said to have taken advantage of its possibilities or the opportunities offered to it, rather it has been an expert wasting them due to short-sightedness or venality. And here we Colombians go again this Sunday, each relying on his meager certainties. Hopefully this time we will give an opportunity to those who best embody our beliefs and not to those who promise to justify our grudges, prejudice or hatred.
John Gabriel Vasquez He’s a writer. His latest novel is Looking Back (Alfaguara).
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