Preventive defeat did not end on the 21st of June. It changed shape. Before the first round, the operation consisted of convincing you that voting was not worth the trouble. It now consists of convincing you that continuing is not worth the trouble, that two hundred and fifty thousand votes of difference are a sentence rather than a margin, that the reasonable response to such a narrow defeat is silence.
It is the same lie, wearing a different disguise.
Iván Cepeda lost by less than one point to a lawyer with no party and no prior public office, and he acknowledged it with the dignity democracy demands. He did so pointing to something that deserves to be said without euphemism, a campaign openly backed by Donald Trump and celebrated by his American Secretary of State minutes after the polls closed, before any official certification, in a country that did not vote for Washington yet somehow keeps answering to it. That is not something one votes for. It is inherited, the way a country inherits the dependencies it never quite finishes settling with itself.
What the Colombian left did not lose on the 21st of June was the one thing that actually belongs to it, an organisation that was not born from a campaign. Before the campaign leadership decided to step in, hundreds of young people had already organised themselves, with no committee and no instruction from above, doing on social media the political education the leadership itself only got round to late.
That is not measured in seats or in polls.
The question this newspaper asked on the day of the first round remains exactly as valid today as it was then, and we repeat it deliberately, not for lack of anything new to say, but because coherence means not changing one’s diagnosis to suit the result. It is not a question of who governs. It is a question of what kind of forgetting a country is willing to accept. Colombia had already proven this before the result was even known, with the extermination of the Unión Patriótica, with the falsos positivos, young men killed by the army and presented as guerrilla fighters, with decades of paramilitarism tolerated by the state, and it goes on proving it now. An electoral defeat, however narrow and painful, does not yet oblige anyone to normalise anything.
It obliges a decision, once again, on whether to keep remembering. Coherence is not repeating slogans, it is the organisation that won the street before it won the ballot box still being there once the ballot box is out of sight. Cohesion is not the absence of self-criticism, it is the opposite, being able to point to one’s own campaign mistakes without that being mistaken for surrender.
Resistance, ultimately, is not a word declared the day after losing. It is a word that was already being exercised before the election even began, one that two hundred and fifty thousand votes have no authority to extinguish…
G.S.
