Voting is not an act of hope. That is the first lie to dismantle. Hope is an emotion, and emotions are manipulable, exhaustible, reversible. Those who want you not to vote are counting on your exhaustion. They are counting on four years of incomplete reforms, persistent violence, and promises that reality has worn down until they are barely recognisable, to have convinced you that the gesture is not worth its cost. That is the most sophisticated operation of the Colombian right, more sophisticated than any rigged poll or fear campaign, the one designed to make you believe that disenchantment is a form of lucidity.
It is not. Disenchantment is simply another name for preventive defeat.
There is a question older than Colombian democracy, older than the Republic, that resurfaces every time a society reaches a moment like this. It is not who deserves to win. It is what kind of forgetting it is prepared to accept. Colombia has a particular relationship with that question because it has built its modern history on an extraordinary capacity to normalise what, in any other context, would be scandalous. The extermination of an entire political party was absorbed into daily life without the country stopping. The false positives, young men killed by the army and presented as guerrillas, were absorbed. Paramilitarism as state policy was absorbed. Each time something was normalised, someone took the decision that continuing to live was more urgent than continuing to remember. And each time someone took that decision, the next horror became a little more possible.
What is at stake today is not a government programme. It is that question, again. It is whether Colombia chooses to continue a process that, for all its contradictions and imperfections, has attempted for the first time in its history to make the State something other than an instrument in the hands of the same people as always, or whether it chooses to return, with different vocabulary and a different face, to the only form of order that certain sectors of this country have always considered legitimate, the one imposed from above, with the logic of fear, and subsequently called stability.
Voting today is a philosophical act. It is taking a position on the question of what deserves to be remembered and what can be, once again, normalised. One does not vote for a candidate. One votes for the version of the country one is prepared to defend when there are no longer cameras or slogans or campaign urgency. One votes for the kind of silence one is prepared to inhabit if things go wrong.
Colombia already knows what that silence sounds like. It has inhabited it before. The question is whether it is prepared to choose it again, this time in full awareness of what it is doing…
G.S.
Updated June 12, 2026
