Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

THE WORLD 80 YEARS AGO

In 2021, Semana magazine published a special edition dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The first part of the edition is entitled "Colombia Nazi", and talks about Colombia´s attitude towards the Jews during the Second World War. According to the magazine, a very well-known character at that time was the Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis López de Mesa, who in 1939 sent a circular to the consuls of Hamburg, Berlin and Warsaw asking them to put all humanly possible obstacles to the visa of new passports to Jewish elements. Similarly, López de Mesa demanded that Romanian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Italian Jews not enter Colombian territory.

81 years have passed since then. We are in the month of June 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues. In Colombia, unemployment, economic and labor instability, as well as crime, advance with ferocity. In the streets people sing, sell things, and tell sad stories asking for a coin in exchange. Most of these people are Venezuelans who flee their country every day due to the situation that we all know. You also see Colombians who have eluded fate and are doing their best not to starve.

All of us do what we can to not starve. The luckiest of us have a profession and a job that allows us to live quite well. The others, those who are on the other side of the street, so to speak, beg, steal and kill to get out of an impossible situation.

81 years ago, the world was at war. In those days the bad guys were the Germans, more specifically the National Socialist party. And the oppressed, at least for the most part, were the Jews who lived in Europe. Now, for those who have read or seen movies on that theme, especially "Schindler´s List" or "The Pianist", they know that being a Jew at that time and place in the world meant certain death.

The world has changed since then. Jews are not locked up in concentration camps to lavish on them the most heinous abuse. In that sense, the world has a different view of itself. Except for the fact that he doesn´t.

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Digital technology has created since the early 2000s the idea of ​​the “Global Village”. With a single click you can find out what people live and feel at the opposite end of the planet. On YouTube, if I type in the Life in Somalia search engine, it throws me “The famine in Somalia: the reality on the ground”, “Somalia: extreme drought puts the country on the brink of famine”, “The failed state of the pirates – History of Somalia in 17 minutes”, and so on until reaching more than 20 results on the first page regarding the situation in that country.

Never before in human history have we been so close and yet so far away. We can travel the world in 5 minutes without leaving home. The experience will not be the same, of course, but the concept of distance, at least in our minds, has diminished considerably.

What has not diminished considerably, not even in our minds or in our idea of ​​the outside world, is the imposition of one culture on the other; of one nation over another, of one race over another. The idea of ​​value, I mean monetary value and power as a consequence of the first, prevailing in the richest nations, global village or not, remains the oldest constant of humanity.

We Colombians know a little about the perception of superiority that a certain nation has over us. The epithet "sudaca" refers to Colombian immigrants in Spain. Indeed, "sudaca" comes from South American, and with it all the inhabitants of South America are understood. Likewise, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the crime rates of Colombian immigrants in Spain and the rise of the drug cartels, which gave us such sad notoriety worldwide, made everything a country the idiosyncrasy of corruption and universal violence.

An entire country with its culture and its history was reduced to what Pablo Escobar and so many others like him did. Being Colombian (to a certain extent it still is) was very bad when it came to going through immigration at airports and also to apply for any visa. Being Colombian meant that, in some way, you had a link to drug trafficking, or that you were a potential thief. This was the case in Spain and in the United States.

The world is not what it was 81 years ago. 81 years ago Europe was a ship on fire and people were doing the impossible to jump into the choppy sea. The American dream in the United States was booming and Asia and Africa were mysterious and unknown giants. South America they hardly knew. Australia in Oceania was so exotic and new that no one dared to imagine it as a destination to emigrate and flourish. Both of us were isolated from the rest of the world except for the United States and part of Europe.

Today, 2022, the month of June, we would like to emigrate far away to get out of this South America that seems to be hitting rock bottom very soon. The problem is that once we think we are at the bottom, so low that we imagine there is no way to continue descending, the world under our feet opens and we fall to a new hell that we did not believe could exist.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante divides hell into 9 circles separated from each other in a descending manner. The seventh circle is that of violence and this is divided into three turns: 1) Those who are violent against others. 2) Against themselves. 3) Against God.

Far from being an expert on Dante, I am a keen observer of humanity. Every day, when leaving home, I observe acts of violence against others, the occasional murderer will be among them, tyrants are found in all countries of the world, rapists are caught from time to time according to the news, and bandits abound , especially in this fiery Colombia that ignites such low passions in the jungles and coasts whose population is the most vulnerable.

Things are no better in the big cities. In a certain sense they are, I mean that in Bogotá we are not completely defenseless if we compare ourselves with a peasant who lives in the mountains. Away from the police and the army. And very close to the BACRIM, the FARC dissidents, the paramilitaries and criminals who are not organized like the BACRIM. Just criminals.

In the big cities we are not helpless like in the jungles and the coasts. We can find a policeman to save us from a robbery or a horrible death. That´s true. However, when we are in danger, there is no one who can help us. A robbery happens in a matter of seconds. So that you do not get scopolamine you must not be in a lonely tunnel at night. No. With scopolamine they can make you disappear from the world in a matter of minutes and without even having to force you on a street full of potential witnesses.

How can you defend yourself from the mouth of a revolver that points to that vast inner world that you hide behind your eyes? You can insult, run or even present your fists to prevent them from taking your cell phone or, worse, your life. You can do many things in the 5 seconds a robbery takes, but in the end, whether they kill you or let you live in fear of it happening again, depends on the person who wants with all his or her soul to take your belongings. Or of your life. Or what is worse: your fear of the world outside your window.

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I have always been afraid to travel within Colombia. As a teenager, my mother and I watched a program about Bariloche, in Argentina. I knew then that I had to travel the world to find meaning in life. Some years later, when I finally left Colombia, to each place where I arrived and said where I came from, some people, those who did not care to ask ignorant questions impregnated with commonplaces about Pablo Escobar and the armed groups, they asked how much I knew about my own country. “Nothing”, that was the reply. I didn´t know anything because I was afraid of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, the BACRIM and the countless horrors that abound on the roads of my country. In fact, the second time I traveled to the Coast I was 31 years old. Before that, I went from San Gil to Bucaramanga and Bogotá. I never backpacked to Tayrona Park, like some of my friends, because I was terrified that someone would kidnap me. Or that someone believed that I was an informant for the guerrillas or the paramilitaries or woke up from the dream that means being alive by stepping on a field destined for the cultivation of coca.

I guess I´m more of a storyteller than a journalist and I don´t find much difference between an opinion piece, an essay and a novel. It all has to do with the grammar and language classes that I was so bad at school. In any case, here we are: a writer who gets confused when he writes and a country with a terrible history of anti-Semitism, at least during the Second World War, and the demon of xenophobia that acts more and more viciously in Colombia. We also have the problem of being outcasts in some parts of the world because the sins of a few are paid for by many. A small number of people in Colombia are drug traffickers or guerrillas or paramilitaries, and yet, it is the first thing we are asked as soon as we set foot abroad. That is why I refuse to say where I come from when I travel outside Colombia, unless someone mentions Gabriel García Márquez, in which case I go crazy with emotion, and give my ignorant, but enthusiastic, appreciations about 100 years of loneliness.

It´s funny, right? We are looking for a way to escape from this burning ship that is Colombia, and at the same time we feel proud to be Colombians, at least when mentioning García Márquez, Andrés Caicedo, Efraim Medina Reyes, Daniel Samper Pizano, Fernando Vallejo and José Eustasio Rivera. In reality, it is more contradictory than funny, because there is nothing funny about seeing the situation in our own country so desperate, in fact, many of us look for a way to emigrate to another continent, even if it is to wash bathrooms in order to earn more and live without the fear of being murdered on the street for a cell phone. Perhaps that is why I mentioned at the beginning that 81 years ago people in Europe would do the impossible to escape to America, and now, almost a century later, we are the ones who could lie and cheat in order to comply with the endless requirements that are demanded of us, Colombians, to live in any country in Europe, or if we stay in America, Canada is the most feasible destination, or the United States.

The latter country is the object of incursions such as “Paraíso Travel” (a novel written by Jorge Franco, in which he recounts the macabre experience of a couple of Colombians who enter the United States illegally from Mexico), and due to this, Mexico will begin to request a visa to us, Colombians. Visa like the one requested in the United States, Canada, Spain, Portugal, France, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and most countries in the world.

It is difficult to reconcile the feeling of rejection that so many countries profess towards us. That they ask us for a visa everywhere shows the distrust that we inspire in the world. In the Central and South Americas, nowhere do they ask us for a visa to visit. Except, rumor has it, Mexico. We´ll see if in a few months the land of Juan Rulfo, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, tacos, the Molotov group and the permanent residence of García Márquez for the last 53 years of his life, will put such a limitation on us to visit the Riviera Maya. Or to go to the great market of D.F. to listen to mariachis and drink tequila. We will see countless things in the not too distant future where more doors will be closed to us, because the desperation to go out and look for a better future makes a few a real danger to the world.

I don´t know the situation in the whole world except for what little I see in the news, but at least in Colombia, which is the country where I live, I can say that desperate people abound in the streets, in the fields, in the coasts, in the jungles. Everywhere you look, you can see families begging for food and elderly people wearing shuffling rags to cover themselves from the rain. You also see groups of young people who don´t mind stabbing someone to steal their wallet. The situation is so desperate that even in the entrances of the buildings alert notices are displayed for the proliferation of robberies with scopolamine.

The streets feel unsafe because they really are. The uncertainty of whether you will wake up in a hospital not knowing how you got there, because three days ago you were sprayed with scopolamine and were lucky enough to survive an overdose without being stupid or crazy.

There are so many ways you can get lost on your way to work that you don´t know where to turn or who can save you. We rely on paranoia as the only defense against the innumerable dangers of the street and even then you are not saved from what it can do to you. What to do then? Flee from the burning ship that is Colombia? Looking for a country where they don´t kill you for stealing your cell phone? No more scopolamine? Employment stability for $20 an hour 10 hours a day? It´s not such a bad idea if you look at it that way, because, after all, any place with decent and stable work is a paradise. A paradise whose opposite is the hell of job and economic uncertainty and whether you will return home with all 5 senses intact after doing your job to the best of your ability; as honest as you can; always looking to the future with a smile on your lips, because despair and uncertainty make any poor devil a potential danger.

Perhaps the ship is on fire all over the world like it was 81 years ago and we are nowhere safe. Perhaps we should close the door of our home with us inside and secure it with rivets and easy chairs so that no one can enter. Perhaps we should live in fear because the Ukraine-Russia war could spread to the whole world as it did 81 years ago. There are too many variables in an equation that no one can solve. I declare myself incapable of envisioning a solution and that is why I complain so much. I complain because living a productive life without hurting anyone, minding your own business, is not that difficult. The excessive ambition of a few who want to have everything from the rest of us, is perhaps part of the problem. The absence of brotherhood is also.

“There is no such thing as hate, only the absence of friendship”. I don´t remember who said it, but I read this sentence 15 years ago and have carried it with me ever since. I would like to ask the author (perhaps he is still alive) if he found a place in the world full of friends, not competitors, who reach out when life´s circumstances are pressing. For my part, and despite my inclination to see the world and people at their worst, I will dare to anoint myself with the optimism of the hallucinated who thinks he sees friends everywhere.

I don´t know what I will think tomorrow when I go out on the street with 4 million people who insult you and push you to win a taxi. I just know that we have to start somewhere and that place has to be from the inside out. Within ourselves, the perspective we have of the world and our attitude towards the failures of life. There is no other way. That in Europe people continue invading countries and in Colombia organized crime burns buses on the highways, kidnaps and kills and calls all of this an “armed strike”, is beyond our control. There will always be a Putin who thinks he is Napoleon and a thousand monsters who think they are Pablo Escobar. One and the other do what they feel they should do, even if they destroy the world in the process.

I propose that we do what we must do without hurting anyone. Let us march through “this dark forest” without feeling that we are deviating from the right path, as Dante said, because unlike the Divine Comedy, I do not feel that we are heading to hell, and if we are already there, all we have to do it is to change our inner world and see everything with new eyes; with better eyes. I know it´s harder than it sounds, but like I said before: we have no choice. So let´s leave home with the confidence that we are not complete bastards, and let´s do everything that depends on us to make this world a little better. Of all the decisions we make every day, let us decide to be the best version of ourselves. Let´s be more cordial, more friendly. Let´s be decent people, just as our grandmothers taught us.

The world outside our window may seem a bit like it was 81 years ago, but we can make our own, the inner world that definitely affects the people around us, much better from the insignificance of our actions. That does depend on each one. Just as it is up to me to stop continuing this writing, and that for the two or three who made it this far to go out and do something useful with the rest of their day.