"Visionarios"

Meet us at the Plaza Bolívar, they said. Bring a friend, they said. We arrived, and there was a large orange tent, shaped like a triangle, about 300 people, news cameras, and people handing out small triangular mirrors wrapped with a sticker that read, “ Colombia legal por las buenas” on the back, with “Visionarios con Antanas Mockus” emblazoned under the mirror’s face. A few minutes later, there was a stir, and Mockus emerged somewhere in the crowd. “La Luz…” he intoned. Nothing happened. A few minutes of scrambling passed, the small crowd amusing itself with the mirrors, and then light! Mockus, a two-time mayor of Bogotá, went on with his…lecture? Speech? It wasn’t exactly either – more like the musing of an interesting uncle you haven’t visited for a while, one who’s been pondering the meaning of life while watching his nieces and nephews scamper about, making a mess of their lives.

We were instructed to turn our mirrors towards the light. Suddenly, hundreds of tiny triangles (one corner each for the three pillars of society? Don’t laugh – there was no gimmick too small) burst upon the building behind us. We were illuminating a short phrase etched prominently on its façade –

Colombianos: las armas
os han dado independencia
las leyes os darán libertad
-- Santander

Colombians: arms
have given us independence
laws will give us liberty.
-- Santander

It was moving, I have to admit. Even more affecting was towards the end of the ceremony, whose point was to introduce, officially, members of the party running for the Colombian House and Senate, was felt like an impromptu protest song from the sixties. It wasn’t impromptu, of course, but the whole night had that feel. A man in his fifties broke into a rousing cumbia with the chorus, “we reject the death penalty. We wish to live.” Shortly after, a woman came around with tiny carrot pins. She fastened one to my collar, and I did not ask why. I’d heard of the “Carrot Law” implemented (decreed?) by Mockus during one of his terms, but it seemed an odd symbol for a campaign. (I thought we were doing the mirror thing!) Mockus claims, and he may be right, that this simple law imposing a closing time of 1 AM on bars and clubs, was responsible for the precipitous decline in violent crimes in the city that took place during the late 1990s. Probably wasn’t the only factor, but a factor nonetheless.

I’m looking at the carrot pin and sticky mirror sitting in my desk drawer. I would be pretty shocked if Mockus were elected president (the other former mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, first dropped out of the presidential race, then campaigned for current president and Bush pal Uribe, and now is running for Congress, also under the auspices of his own, eponymous party), but he does know how to get people thinking. That was his job as dean at La Universidad Nacional here in Bogotá, and although he quit that place with a thud (of his pants falling down on stage as he mooned the rowdy auditorium of students), he hasn’t quit the habit of pedagogy.

I’ve been surprised by the level of support he still enjoys in Bogotá, given that some of his antics have been described in the English press as well, antics, but here they seem to have truly accomplished their objective – to get a dialogue rolling. It’s apparent that he gave Bogotá just what it needed at the time: mimes, public baths, and talk of a real and powerful civil society. Surrounded by a violent insurrection with actors on the right and left, now some 40-odd years old, it was a powerful yet playful antidote to what ailed a city.