In this election I lost several friends; my stance against peace agreements manipulated for the benefit of the rise to power of the FARC, and the consolidation of a tight circle of rulers, indolent towards corruption has earned me several insults and two threatening phone calls.
From the beginning I said that the great error of the process, unaccountably, but advantageously presented to the international community as a yes or no to a peace treaty, was the exclusion of the most dynamic sectors of society; that is, farmers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, workers, builders and urban unemployed.
This great mass of voters who said no to these agreements; indeed they already expected a defeat foretold; after all the government had mobilized billions of pesos to ensure a resounding triumph of the YES. In the pages of Facebook and Twitter you still can read threatening messages.
The most sinister items of the agreements was the creation of a special task force armed to track down and prosecute those who oppose the content of such agreements: Lenin's Cheka police couterpart.
In other words, if the Colombian people despised by these politicians had not rejected such "Peace" agreement last Sunday, that very people would had been syndicated in not a too distant future. And that just for criticizing such Draconian agreements.
Not just President Uribe, but also many friends, announced that the prison would be their fate, and that by the mere fact of having expressed disagreement to the victorious peace agreements.
To put it another way, what it felt was not that they were peace agreements as such, but a surrender of all Colombia to a bloody, guerrilla, a terrorist group guilty of crimes against humanity.
And the campaign of bullying can only be measured by the exaggerated threats that have emerged by those who lost the plebiscite in the last hours. Senator Claudia Lopez tweeted that all dead from now on must fall on the heads of those who voted NO. She said that without even considering that every dead falls only on the head of the murderer who pressed the trigger or--as happened in Colombia, on the head of that man who commands a soldier from La Habana, to press the trigger. In fact no one among the ranks of the SI I know had even consider whether this defeat wasn't mainly due to having bullied and vilified as Idiots those who didn't agree with their hatred. Particularlly the world has seen how they boiled down against two figures of national life: President Uribe and former Attorney Ordoñez. What they were not able to consider in their intolerance, was that these two figures were certainly more respected among the working masses than the FARC leaders. The illusion of the approval of those agreements, which were written to grant unprecedented authority to President Santos, was encouraged by a horde of journalists from newspapers and magazines well founded by State advertising. They were also fabulous trips, specialization courses and workshops to subsidize a post-conflict era: all promises for people who supported the YES vote. Such strategy was also rewarding intellectuals and university professors. I can count on my fingers, in fact, artists, poets and writers who demonstrated against the falacious "Peace" agreement. Very few intellectuals, in fact, agreed to discuss my ideas, but they always ended either silent before my arguments, or insulting me, accusing me of being a paramilitary soldier. Fortunately my life in various countries, where dissenting ideas are respected, and where hegemony is taken as a symptom of fanaticism, kept me firm in my concepts. I decided to get away from the intellectual and university life for a year, in order to apply my ideas as a manager of a small construction window provider company. We were threatened, on the one hand, by a competition that used to lounder money, and, on the other hand, by a rising tide of taxes invariably intended--as it was said, to subsidize politicians and now criminal guerrillas. Yesterday I expressed my ideas against the threatening losers of the YES, and quite soon I got warnings from people who I didn't even greet in years. They told me that I should not be arrogant expressing my ideas, that's to say, that I should be humble before the bullying of those who insult me just for my choice to vote NO. Contrary to his fears, I think the middle class and working class are not the murderers, but rather the FARC. They just want a better, more prosperous, less humiliated life, without getting pedantic threats by unrepentant criminals.
And, above all, what the majority said last Sunday to President Santos is: no new taxes. As Professor C Dyke says in The Thinker who Usted to Read Fiction, the only thing that worries the middle class are jobs and taxes, which must be reasonable. Governments who abuse one of these two pillars had been relentlessly put down.