Some years ago, writing about Cuba, political scientist Armando Chaguaceda identified three barriers that stand between a society and uncomfortable knowledge: not being able to see, not knowing how to see, and not wanting to see. The first is factual, because there is no access to information. The second is epistemic, because one’s frame of reference prevents information from being properly processed even when it is available. The third is volitional, because one has everything needed to see and nevertheless chooses not to. It is worth applying these categories to Colombia, because they explain with unsettling precision the silence of so many who once claimed to be critics of Gustavo Petro’s government but who have now chosen to turn a blind eye and abandon their principles under the belief that they were “standing up for life.”
Nothing could be further from the truth, considering that this government and its continuity candidate, Iván Cepeda, were the architects of the so-called Total Peace. A poorly structured plan intended to end Colombia’s armed conflict that ultimately increased the number of members in illegal armed organizations such as the FARC dissident groups, the ELN, and the Clan del Golfo. It also led to rising homicide rates, kidnappings, massacres, and illicit crop cultivation. So why did the self-righteous embrace this project?
Let us begin with those who cannot see. I am not referring here to urban commentators, but rather to citizens trapped in territories where public order is dictated by the barrel of a gun. In areas controlled by FARC dissident groups, the ELN, or the Clan del Golfo, information about whom it was advisable to vote for did not circulate freely but was filtered through coercion. When an armed group decides that a region must support a particular candidate, voters do not enjoy genuine access to alternatives—they face a wall. Their blindness is the least blameworthy of the three because it is imposed. Yet for that very reason it is also the most serious, and it is precisely the kind of blindness that urban self-righteous elites should be denouncing at the top of their lungs—but they do not. The fact that armed pressure on voters benefits their preferred candidate conveniently renders them deaf.
Next come those who do not know how to see. These are well-intentioned people whose mental framework prevents them from processing what lies before them. For years they built their political identity around the idea that the right was the threat, Uribismo was the danger, and the establishment was the enemy. That framework served them well in criticizing real abuses. But today it functions as a veil. When the ruling party’s candidate refused to question the failures of the outgoing administration, they did not interpret it as a lack of independent judgment but as loyalty. When proposals for a constituent national assembly emerged, they likewise failed to recognize them as a threat to the constitutional order, despite their sectarian character, because they believed that “social reforms needed to be deepened.” In practical terms, they are not lying; they simply lack the conceptual tools to recognize that danger can also come from the side they associate with virtue.
Finally, we arrive at those who do not want to see—the category that Chaguaceda reserves for the most educated and the most responsible, because theirs is a blindness born of choice. These are the columnists, academics, and public figures who once prided themselves on their independence, who distanced themselves from Petro whenever it was politically convenient, and who cultivated the image of people who “call things by their name.” They have full access to information and every tool needed to understand it. They see—and choose to remain silent. They chose not to see that threats to the independence of the Bank of the Republic were not mere rhetorical excesses but rather an effort to weaken an essential institutional check. They chose not to see that the insistence on a plebiscitary form of democracy—that constant appeal to a mobilized people above institutions, judges, and Congress—was precisely the mechanism through which contemporary authoritarian regimes hollow out democracies from within, without a single tank rolling into the streets. They chose not to see it, and even today, despite the evidence that Total Peace amounted to the subordination of the state to the will of armed groups, they still refuse to acknowledge it, because doing so would come at a cost: it would require admitting that, in this case, authoritarianism could also emerge from the Left. It would force them to judge this political project by the same standards they applied to previous ones, to break with their own tribe, and to surrender the comfort of belonging to the camp that, by definition, believes itself to be the side of the righteous.
It is worth pausing to consider why this voluntary blindness almost always leans in the same direction. Right-wing authoritarian or anti-democratic leaders are judged harshly and without nuance, whereas left-wing ones are treated with indulgence, granted mitigating circumstances and the benefit of the doubt. This is why the Petro administration, which is an archetype of the plebiscitary and refoundational model, still escapes open condemnation as anti-democratic. For the self-righteous, it is more comfortable to draw close to a left-wing authoritarianism than to a right-wing one, because the former feels ideologically familiar and is softened by the label “progressive,” while the latter carries the heavier burden of media and academic labels such as “far-right” and “radical.” But this double standard is not an oversight—it is the mechanism by which the tribe protects its own.
Autor
Professor and researcher of the Cuba Program of the Sergio Arboleda Univ. (Bogotá). PhD Candidate in Political Studies and International Relations, National Univ. of Colombia. Editor of Foro Cubano. Coord. of the Observatory of Academic Freedom of Cuba (OLA).
