Colorines Streets

Talking about my Colorines adventure amongst friends we spoke about different things. One of our friends worked in a gubernamental office, as a personal assistant to a public figure. He told us the worrying part about these institutions is not that they steal obscene amounts of money from us. "Thing is, the delusion of power is what makes these people so hurtful, instead of transforming the context to everyone's favour, they do it only for themselves. Take this example, one day, my boss who had a driver, had a bit of a problem on a parking spot due to a lamp post, as soon as he got in the office he told me to get rid of it."

"But sir, it's a lamp post, I will have to contact the electric company, what you ask for is almost impossible". "I don't care" he said, "get rid of it."

"So I did, it cost thousands of pesos, pesos that could have made a better place for others, but this lamp post was on his way."

Sometimes when I listen to these stories I can't believe what I'm listening to. We really do sound like an absurd and fantastic story from García Márquez, where every town is a little bit like a dictatorship where 43 students can be disappeared, lands taken away from entire towns and thousands of women tortured or killed for the mere pleasure of these powerful hands to take what they want, when they want it.

I wonder if we are passive or domesticated to live the way we do. One last recommendation from Angela Buitrago from the GIEI experts was that she hoped people would change. "In what way?" asked the journalist. "In believing that things can actually change."

Change might not come from fighting fiercely towards government in an open fire. A proposal for change might just be what sub-commander Moisés talks about in this video. Change may come directly from the conviction of the people that they can govern themselves with no prior education, with a balanced council and slow paced decisions. By making of rage a dignified force that will develop through a process of resistance. Then ideally, people will change and the government will have to respect the decisions of the small towns and cities. This does not necessarily mean, for example, going to alien (or Capitalistic) practices of medicine, but to go to the source of our ancestral practices, to the way our grandparents and grandmothers used to heal and live: by borrowing, by trade, by our medicinal plants. In education and respect to our roots, therein, lies progress.