Jaime Garzón’s Last Lesson
It was Friday, the 13th, 1999.
I was ready to start one of the last days of my school holidays with my daily dosage of cartoons. I used to plop down in front of the large TV to watch Ash Ketchum & Pikachu beat Team Rocket over and over.
When I got to the living room, the TV was already turned on. My Mom was captivated and completely ignored my entrance (a rarity in my household). Then, I looked over and saw that the news was on with the following headline:
“Jaime Garzón killed this morning”
Some of the details afterwards have remained hidden in the fog of my memories. But I will never forget the tears rolling down my face that day (or nearly every time I think of that day). They traverse the same path.
Who was Jaime Garzón?
Jaime Garzón was the most revered—and if you were the government or part of the elite—feared Colombian journalist and satirist in the 1990s. He was fearless, quick-witted, and was gifted with a lucidity unlike any other contemporary. He was a mirror to our idiosyncrasies, a critic of Colombian politics with Excalibur-like sharpness, and damn funny. Through his humor, he challenged Colombians to be better people, and build a better society.
Watching Garzón and his skits, where he dressed as a maid, shoe polisher, security guard, or a multitude of other characters, was one of the main windows in contextualizing what it was to be Colombian in the 1990s. People in a seemingly eternal conflict, drained of the will to dream big, consumed by the instinct to take care of oneself and their loved ones, but not one person more. I loved watching him criticize the government, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries; anyone who got in the way of peace.
On that Friday, at 5:45am, he was shot to death by a couple of hitmen. His murder was eventually pinned on the right-wing paramilitary who saw him as a threat and a sympathizer of the Marxist guerrillas. There is still debate as to who was really behind it, and how much the Colombian government knew and enabled the crime.
On that Friday, his voice was silenced. Yet, the echoes remain.
Those echoes contain lessons. Those lessons play over and over in my head. The one I hear more often is this:
When discourse disappears, violence becomes the loudest voice. Sounds and words are replaced by bangs and bullets. And the bells of peace won't ring for decades to come.
Garzón’s criticism went “too far”. It got him killed. Yet, his downfall is not that he spoke too sharply, but that by then, speaking up in Colombia against the powerful would get you killed.
“How did we get there?” I ask myself a lot. How is it that speaking truth to power can get you killed? What enables this to happen at a societal level in the first place? How do systems enable the hushing of words via the bang of a gun? You can tell I’m a really fun guy at dinner parties.
When I ask myself these questions, I look at the world today, particularly the US (since I live here), and always end up saying to myself, “this is the beginning of the end of discourse”. Is that a pessimist, or dramatic take? Perhaps. Yet, I am firm in my conviction that if we lose our ability to discourse, if we lose our curiosity and compassion for each other, we will devolve to a place where hopelessness reigns, and the language of the hopeless and the angry turns to violence. And once that becomes the norm, it takes generations to undo.
Both media and social networks have created a cycle where they both reap the benefits of inflammatory/polarizing headlines (the recent news around “The Facebook Papers” confirm as much). And in our search for identities and finding a community to belong to, we are inadvertently making the tradeoffs of belonging in exchange for tribalism. If you are pro-choice/pro-life that automatically means that you are a monster to the other side. No nuance.
Oftentimes, when I bring up my concern to those around me, the counterargument tends to be: “But don’t you believe in X or Y?! When an ‘opinion’ infringes on human rights, trying to see the other side, doesn’t make sense. You must take a stand!”. I get where they are coming from. But multiple things can be true at the same time—you can have strong beliefs (loosely held), and engage those that have a different belief than you with curiosity and compassion.
For example, if someone does not believe in systemic racism, my default is not to say “this person is evil”. Rather, my thinking goes “it’s wild to me this person doesn’t see it, so I really want to understand what their life experience is and their principles, so I can learn as to why we see the world in a fundamentally different way”. I’ve found that leaning in with curiosity makes you less angry, opens up the possibility of more insights, and can actually get you to the point in any relationship where you may be able to persuade someone to see the world the way you do.
Every day that goes by where we dehumanize fellow humans is one day closer to the end of discourse. Every day that we find it more reasonable to admonish than to understand, we stop building a more civil society.
In one of his lectures, Jaime Garzón told a room full of young Colombians that if they memorized the indigenous interpretation of Article 12 of the newly-written (then) Colombian constitution, we would be a better country:
“Nobody will steamroll anybody’s heart nor do them any evil, regardless of whether they think and speak differently.”
Discourse starts with curiosity and compassion. We must never lose that, for we all inhabit the same blue dot in the vastness of our universe.
Ps. Here you can listen to his famous lecture, one of my favorite skits, and the reporting on his death (videos in Spanish with okayish auto-translated captions).
