[ad_1]
Words delivered by former President Ernesto Samper in November 2018 in tribute to former Minister Horacio Serpa Uribe, who died on Saturday. Serpa Uribe received the Alfonso López Michelsen award for humanitarian merits.
(Read also: The former presidential candidate Horacio Serpa died at the age of 77)
We gather this morning to pay tribute to one of those people who abhor tributes. We come to honor Horacio Serpa Uribe, which is a way of exalting the values for which he has fought all his life: truth, loyalty, commitment to people. If I could choose an audiovisual medium to synthesize my productive relationship of so many years of victories and scars with ‘Commander Serpa’ –as I say colloquially–, I would make a collection of memorable photographs.
A first photo would show the night of my attack, on March 3, 1989. Former President Alfonso López Michelsen, while I lay like a sieve in an intensive care bed, cared for by who to this day remains my personal doctor, Alonso Gómez, He sent me and Jacquin three reasons to be calm, so that he would not fear that someone might come, like in the worst cowboy movies, to finish me off. The first said that the clinic of the National Provident Fund, where I was, despite being public, had been modernized during his government. The second, that the Police had taken over the first peripheral security ring, and the third, that Horacio would retire from the Attorney General’s Office, which he was then occupying, to take over the leadership of the debate in my then incipient campaign for the presidency.
(Read also: Farewell to Horacio Serpa Uribe, a freehand liberal)
Horacio Serpa passed away on Saturday, October 31.
Cesar Melgarejo. TIME
That night I slept more peacefully than the night in which he explained to me, in the midst of one of those many unforgettable crises that we lived through during my government, why he had released the ‘They sound like me’ that linked the DEA with the kidnapping attempt from my defense attorney Antonio José Cancino. “President,” he told me, “I don’t want to cause any problems for the government, much less for you. If the best thing for the country is for me to leave, count on my resignation ”, he did it with that little tone that Santanderians use to emphasize certain phrases of those in which one, in the end, does not know if they are scolding or treating him like an auditory invalid. I replied: “He is not going to put me in the wrong here,” I said, “with those two or three gringos assholes who want to lay me down. Here we both stay as Siamese for whatever comes, I added, “and business concluded. He left my office smiling and I was calm: my guardian was still in the estate.
I also collect the photograph of the day that Serpa, with a loud ‘Mamola’ before the Senate, explained to the world, in Santander, the meaning of my phrase “here I am and here I stay.” I was not leaving the presidency.
(Read also: Horacio Serpa, the last of the liberal caudillos)
From Spain I also keep, Horacio, the memorable photograph of your international launch at the Seville Fair, when, as I was the Colombian ambassador to Spain, thousands of people asked for your autograph without anyone dared to clarify that you were not Juan Valdez .
Serpa is one of those endangered people who think what they say, and say what they think. Who believe more in ethical values than in stock values. They come to this world with a built-in GPS of moral principles embedded in their soul that enables them to make fair decisions at fair times. Like the day he made the decision to take over, at the worst moment of narco-terrorism, the fight against Pablo Escobar, whom he described, from the moment of his possession, as the number one enemy of Colombia. And that by then Escobar’s name still did not appear on the billboards of today’s unbearable international series of films about exemplary, creative, heroic bandits and even good lovers.
(Read also:
Serpa is one of those endangered people who think what they say, and say what they think. Who believe more in ethical values than in stock values
In another of those moments, Serpa also faced, as Minister of the Interior, right-wing terrorism that was liquidating the leaders of the Patriotic Union as today it does again with social leaders for daring to defend peace and the demobilized for abiding by it.
Yes, peace! Horacio’s only passion that exceeds the one he has for Rosita. The compass of his life has been his permanent and persistent commitment to that other woman to whom he has dedicated trips, hours of insomnia, tiring conversations and many tears, even if they say that Santanderians do not cry, they do cry, but secretly. That woman – Rosita’s rival – is the peace of Colombia. We have been looking for the same peace to which we are gazing today, that complex and elusive peace, with Serpa since we met in Barrancabermeja, his favorite city, which, according to him, is very similar to New York.
(Read also: The love story of Horacio Serpa and Rosita Moncada)
At the time, I was coordinating the campaign of our ideological boss Alfonso López Michelsen and he had a few years of experience with me, the same as it takes me now if math doesn’t fail me. Since then, and until today, we have been talking, like wet parrots, about the flags of People’s Power, our political project that, with that of New Liberalism, were the only renovating proposals within traditional politics at the end of the last century. Alternatives for change that sought to survive in the middle of the closed room of the National Front and the caudina gallows of the neoliberal model of the nineties that cost us, with the economic openness, blood, sweat and tears.
As anchorites of the past, Serpa and I still vibrate when they talk to us about social justice, sovereignty, regional integration, decriminalization of the drug chain so as not to continue hitting its weak links, the right of Venezuelan migrants to have rights, South.
Together we have traveled the national geography, inch by inch. Many campaigns in which his resonant vibrato got used to coexisting with my boring nasal accent. Thanks to these adventures, our digestive system is still ready to eat today from a guinea pig in Nariño to a friche in Riohacha.
(Read also: Santander politicians mourn the death of Horacio Serpa)
The compass of his life has been his permanent and persistent commitment to that other woman (peace) to whom he has dedicated trips, hours of insomnia, tiring conversations and many tears
In the Popular Power, we made gaminism, that is, the street, a form of political struggle. Ours was always the street and through the street we reached the Palace. But we do not arrive alone. We arrived with that ‘rabble’ that the media despised so much that they never liked us as “dangerous”: the street vendors arrived, those of the sanandresitos, the paneleros of Vélez, the small homeowners, the pensioners, the teachers vindicated and the students in an uproar; The smiling Afro from the Pacific, astute indigenous people, believers of all faiths and representatives of all genders also came to the Palace. Our great battles were the exploits of romantics against materialistic pragmatists. Idealists versus calculators. Shameless populists against shameful neoliberals.
Although – returning the film – perhaps we committed the sacrilege of thinking at some point that we could paint our dreams red and turn them into proposals from the Liberal Party. We think that the great historical figures who turned liberalism into a team of pioneering heroes could be emulated to face new social storms. Maybe we made a mistake or we did it very late, until we get to today, when one is no longer of age or in the mood to change wife, soccer team or political party.
Although, on second thought, perhaps there is a way out to prevent whoever has become the eternal head of liberalism from destroying what little remains of the glorious Liberal Party. We can try a transfusion to the young liberals of our socialist dreams, which will remain the same as long as there is poverty without freedom in the world.
(Read also: ‘Concludes a cycle to which I never sensed an end’: Uribe on Serpa)
It doesn’t matter, Commander Serpa: even if we are in the departure lounge –to what Nietzsche called the final port of arrival–, there is still time and there will always be time to dream and fight. To teach young people that what matters, as Don Quixote said, is not just fighting, but fighting for an ideal. To be in solidarity with the current causes that are the same that we defended before with another face: in solidarity with the students who ask for more public education, with the victims of the conflict who are being denied their spaces, with the enemies of the new Hood model- Robin who seeks that those below pay the tax reductions to those above, with the coca growers on the eve of being fumigated again, with the guardians of the moors, rivers and animals, with those who are sitting in front of empty chairs from Havana and those who defend our Sisbén in the long lines of the hospitals. Spaces to dream and fight for new references that prevent the market, a source of corruption, from ending the idea of public service that made you, Horacio, one of those great citizens such as Miguel Samper Agudelo, my ancestor, and his countryman, Aquileo Parra.
The benchmark for loyalty above all else! The benchmark for coherence in thought! The benchmark of commitment to those below! The benchmark for the defense of innocent people in the middle of the armed conflict! For the historical act of having been consistent with those references is why today we are doing this tribute, more than deserved, on behalf of the International Humanitarian Law of Colombia! Commander Serpa: for peace, equality and life, goodbye! Until forever!
* ERNESTO SAMPER
For the time*
In other news
– Samper’s hard trill against the Government for murders of ex-Farc
– Samper explains why he feels victim of the FARC’s silence
– The Dignity Movement, Robledo’s bet for his political future
