Columns & Blogs

The number that concerns me the most from the opinion poll "Colombia Opina' is the 83% of compatriots that propose to disobey the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In case of conflict between justice and law, what should prevail? This has been debated since the classic Greece. There are those who say that justice prevails because it representes a universal value. Others say no, that law prevails because the ideal of justice changes through time.

Many of the great political leaders have been talented communicators. Charles de Gaulle, for example, had a particular capacity to interprete the feelings of the french and to design, with his words, real utopies that united and mobilized the people. Uribe's communication talented doesn't consist in mobilizing people through a speech that shows a reachable future. His thing is more like playing a character of Big Brother, with the lightness of the "Protagonista de novela".

Last tuesday the race for the United State's presidency ended. But I think that, even more important than that, at least for us in Colombia, was the popular decision, that same day, of legalizing the cannabis consume in the states of Washington and Colorado.

Travelling through the roads of Antioquia I watch a sign from the "Legan Antioquia campaign", promoted by governor Sergio Fajardo. It reads as follows: "If someone provokes you, will you swindle him or her on a deal? There is a very thin line between being legal and being ilegal; where are you?".

In march I published a column with the results of an OCDE study that showed how a country depends on oil's exportation less habilites and knowledge is acquired their youngsters through the education system.

Las thursday, in Oslo, the negotiations between the Farc and the Government began. The first one to speak was the spokesman of the Government, Humberto de la Calle.

Each political group likes to talk about what it knows. The left talks about social rights, political participation and human rights, among others. The right, on the other hand, loves talking about security, moral, culture, business, etc.

Nicolás Boileau, a french writer of the XVII century, used to say that every protestant was a pope when he had a Bible in his hands. This sentence well reflects the luteran idel of liberating believers from the ecclesiastical hierarchies and of reducing the religious to God, the scriptures and grace.

One of the most hateful practices of the authoritarian regimes it of punishing someone for the simple fat of belonging to a social group considered dangerous for the regime. Students in military dictatorships, homosexuals in islamic theocracies or the black in the Apartheid are only some of the most visible examples. This practice is founded in an ideology that is known as penal peligrosism, prescribed since the beginnings of the XIXth century, but that we are still far away from having banished from the occidental democracies, as the social composition of the prison population shows. Here, I want to speak about about a type of peligrosism that is rarely mentioned, but that still persists and progresses. I mean the discriminatory way how countries treat immigrants when they enter and leave their frontiers.

Fernando Savater once said that wars live over all on words and that, therefore, adding words to war is like adding fuel to the fire.

In his last column, "The law of the funnel", Salud Hernández says that those who criticize the Prosecuter are religious fundamentalists that stand for a sacred model of society. Hernández acuses them of commiting the same sin that they denounce (intolerance) but without listening to their arguments.