“Cauca has great potential to move forward”: archbishop of Popayán

“Going to various places in the country, I was in Catatumbo for nine years in conditions that are not those of Cauca. No. When I arrived here, I never stopped feeling that you can get ahead here. It’s just that if you saw… I haven’t found any road that I would say: -No shit, I’m in Catatumbo. I have turned many trails, not all of them yet, but there is no road that scares me. The thing is that in Catatumbo: Ecopetrol producing oil, but looking outside, it was read as a blessing for some and a curse for others. It seemed like a very strange thing, at the same time it generated a dynamic, but at the same time others felt cursed by the oil and by everything that that meant, very difficult in Catatumbo: the culture of war, all that step of paramilitarism is a page that hurt a lot of territory. Well, I could go on describing, but culturally your potential is enormous in a department of people in a cultured city. In Tibú I always had the war here in the back of my head, but here one walks calmly in many places… Well, now, because of what is happening to us, but in general there are spaces in this territory that one cannot mark with that drama. The way you are, I am delighted.”

Later he commented that in Cauca we fall “into the bad disease of “goodism”, which manifests itself in understanding well the difficult situation we are going through, but we remain paralyzed just as he preached on the feast of the Sacred Heart. “And then we fall into resignation into tolerance with evil, because also to survive we begin to be gentle and we give it space and somehow when we read reality we know how to read it, but at the same time the reaction is not a forceful reaction and we suffer. of goodism. I notice it. They are all good, but they don’t lead to good things. And goodism is bad, terrible as a disease. because we all have good intentions, but without continuous actions to overcome difficulties. That’s like the marches, I already built an equation, I had to go there to the People’s Congress because they had taken the nunciature that month. … The equation of all marches is summarized in a protest with a block of requests, a tool that is pressure, a dialogue that will always be the best invented solution for crises. After the dialogue comes a bank of proposals, a table with some agreements; but the distance between the bank of requests, the dialogue that becomes the tool and the written agreements is short. But from the agreement to fulfilling it, the distance is very long, so no one complies and after a year they say they did not comply with us and the problems return because there is a large accumulation of unfulfilled agreements.”

Later he referred to the enormous potential of the territory and the inhabitants of Cauca to move forward: “You look at the countryside… I was in love with that Lerma hill, and I was there in San Pablo, up there, that whole area, how landscapes! If I live complimenting all that. Of course, I look up and say it’s a pity that it is full of war, but really, one looks at Cauca with what I bring from experience from other parts of the country, I was also in the plains. I look at Cauca and you have some potential. In these diagnoses we usually look only at the car below the thing, and that marks us a lot, it gives us strength, because of course, there is one thing that I have detected that is bad in the culture here. They are entangled in mistrust that they have built historically. They are fractured, but one says: If they were to have a meeting point, they would all transform Cauca, because here there is nothing that is wasted in social leadership, in structures, the entire social movement is the most powerful thing there is. Marked by certain lines, whatever you want, but here there are educated people, this is a university city where there is more culture than in other parts of the country.”

He recalled that in Catatumbo they could not put cassava in competition with coca, “well that didn’t work, oil palm began to get there, but that became an ecological problem, etc. They uprooted the cocoa to plant that coca and cocoa does not have an important market, because no one puts the value scale on that, and there is no one who processes it to obtain greater benefits… But in Cauca, I see small-farm growers processing coffee for export. That is, one says a line like coffee, that I am drinking it and that I love it. We planted coffee there at the retirement home and we are going to launch our brand, the avocado, all that. So I say, How come we don’t get ahead?”, highlighting that “in another reading, we are a stopper, a sad stopper for the country, because for the country in the center there is no reference, Cauca is not contributing anything. And for the south, that should be a hope, after the Venezuelan border was broken. We have the south left, the southern cone of the continent, but we are the stopper. “That’s just the issue of the road.”

Later, and not to stop at the diagnosis, he recalled a positive experience he had before coming from Catatumbo, when they published a newspaper “that only talks about the good things about Catatumbo and that talks about the good ones.” It was called the Peacemaker, a Catholic entity financed it. We published four issues until I came… I remember that we told the stories of the good guys, because the bad guys always appeared on the radio telling their story, the protagonists of the war, all the stories. dramatic things. And then the newspaper was not even a church newspaper. We had a little strip at the end with a writing there.”

To conclude the improvised meeting, Archbishop Sánchez Cubillos expressed his willingness to collaborate with the publication of a newspaper that highlights the heroes of good, who exist everywhere” and offered to make representations to universities linked to the church to schedule cycles of academic training for Cauca journalists “so that they learn to transmit a more complete reading of what Cauca is and help to be builders of peace everywhere… I don’t know if this semester or the next, calling for some universities that are our friends, help train journalists for Cauca who dare a little more, who train for this conflict and who learn to transmit a different reading of what Cauca is and that helps heal scars between the various sectors, to make cement and stop fracturing what is already fractured… Cauca needs communicators to help it find itself and they have a circle of influence that must be improved, each one has a sector, each one has an audience, each one has a political position of reading, of territory, but it is time to contribute to the unity of Cauca…”

Specifically, the training cycles for journalists could be programmed “in our retreat house, or wherever, some, with some blocks, let’s not call them training, construction and with professionals who come from other horizons, oxygenate us and give us what It would be the desire, the objective, to give us a focus to communicate towards the direction of peace building. You know how to read the realities that are seen, but, but of course, here there are people who sometimes in the media make a very tremendous figure when it comes to polarizing. But look, the regional has value, a lot of value, if you all put yourself in a perspective, without lacking objectivity, of helping to seal fractures and wounds and making people see other perspectives from regional journalism different from those of that national journalism, because there they tell us how they want and giving primacy to violence and tragedies… I believe that this meeting has a purpose, I say, nothing is fortuitous. Silvio is doing homework. I think so, but Silvio has us here, this gift, if you accept me: There is a project that is already underway, on a German line, called Leapaz and they proposed it to us and we are the pilot for the south. From there I can draw a dependency, because Leapaz is in charge of providing the most correct, most objective, least poisoned, least bad information for our internal communication. And put it at the service of the operators. But from that project we could do a pilot here, valuing the regional and with the common purpose of helping Cauca advance in this culture at the service of peace.”