In times of messianic leaders, or with aspirations to be one, it is worth reviewing the recent history of Colombia and highlighting the genuine leaders we have had. Learn how they came to be, relive their epiphanies and witness how they built a transformative vision for the country. I am referring to Galán, whose biography Luis Carlos Galán, intimate and public, my brother, was written by Gabriel Galán. In recent days we met in Bucaramanga and, in addition to that, he gave me a book about his father, Mario Galán Gómez, who was president of Ecopetrol.
The key fact of Galán’s adolescence was using his precocity with words to write intense texts of a strange depth for a schoolboy, which revealed a vigorous and ductile use of language, and an ability to link together sharp and provocative ideas.
At the university, when the obvious candidate of liberalism for the Presidency of the Republic, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, found little acceptance among young people, Galán wrote a letter of support and collected more than 1,000 signatures among university students. It was a risky political move, as he moved away from the leftism that was fashionable in the mid-1960s. Because of his audacity and unexpectedness, he gave him immense returns. He entered the radar of the next president of the Republic and the director and owner of Timethe newspaper with the largest circulation, to which he was called to collaborate shortly after.
At the age of 26, Misael Pastrana appointed him Minister of Education, which attracted the attention of the entire country. The most daring thing was not his age, but his ideas. He proposed a series of reforms that caught politicians by surprise. The tortuous process through Congress and the partial approval he achieved gave him a lesson in politics and humility.
As a result, Luis Carlos Galán had an epiphany about how things work in Colombia. In his words: “Colombia is a center country, which rejects ideological extremes, does not want either ultra-left or ultra-right. Our society does not accept accelerated, almost revolutionary evolutions [como las que pretendió en su ministerio]. To achieve his goals, the visionary leader must advance step by step, in a patient process of convincing his compatriots, until they grasp the goodness of his ideas.”
From there came his vision of forming a group of political leaders that, over a period of 25 years, would positively transform Colombia. A leader is not enough, Galan thought. The presidents of Colombia have failed in that. As part of their legacy they have not left a cohesive group that can endure with a consistent vision for a quarter of a century.
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Successful examples should be sought in regional governments. The team created by Álex Char in Barranquilla comes to mind, which has already completed 16 years with documented positive impacts, and can perhaps be projected until the quarter of a century that Galán proposed. Now, the succession of the mayors of Bogotá, Garzón, Moreno, Petro and López was of dubious benefit for the city (Peñalosa entered there like a wedge).
To avoid personalism, Galán thought the following: “We need to organize political institutions that allow us to systematically seek that destiny, without thinking that there are miraculous men who will transform the country overnight.”
He had distrust of the political parties that dominated the scene. He used the following simile: “Society is like a truck, which needs accelerator and brake. If it doesn’t have an accelerator it doesn’t move, and if it doesn’t have a brake it crashes. The Liberal Party was the accelerator and became the handbrake, and society was left with two brakes. What we want is to rebuild the accelerator, because there were sectors of conservatism that felt they had the right to move the truck. That is the entire identity crisis of our parties.”
A long dispute with the majority liberalism tendencies of the eighties, Lopism and Turbayism, and a distancing from Lleras Restrepo, spiritually led him to the conviction that it was necessary to change the institutions. With the conviction that a single leader is not enough, he conceived that a constitutional reform was necessary, knowing that what was embodied there would require many people and a long time to become a reality. The decision to make peace between the New Liberalism and the old was to lead to that reform. The 1991 Constitution can therefore be called Galán’s posthumous Constitution, although, as we know, it had other leaders.
We all know how the tragic end of Luis Carlos Galán occurred, at the hands of Pablo Escobar and his henchmen, which included one of his political rivals. What Gabriel Galán reveals is a deep psychological fiber, related to the fact: “Luis Carlos read the novel at that time The Last Temptation of Christ, by Niko Kazantzakis; This book made a deep impression on him, in particular it told me about the part of Jesus Christ’s dilemma on the cross: whether to get off it to live a more normal, peaceful and fruitful life but without reaching the supreme sacrifice, or die on the cross and save the human race. Finally Christ chose to die on the cross. After some more time of debate with himself, in which he still persisted in doubting him, Luis Carlos consolidated his decision and then chose to continue his political struggle with even greater vigor. “Decision that cost him his life but made him immortal for Colombia.”
It has been said that our country has had many heroes and few martyrs. In Galán and in so many judges, journalists, colonels, police officers and soldiers who in the last 40 years have fought courageous and unequal struggles against the forces of evil, we find countless martyrs. But we do not pay them the tribute they deserve. There are not many biographies about the martyrs. We are indebted to them. Gabriel decided to write this book about Galán due to the unforgivable absence of a biography about his brother.
On the contrary, today there are tours in cities and farms, to visit the properties of those who ordered the murder of our martyrs. NETFLIX series are made and biographies are written. Using Kazantzakis’s scene, with his sacrifice Christ could not really redeem the human race, and with his, Galán could not save Colombia from his fate either. Look where we are 35 years after his death. But from immortality both serve as a shining beacon in such turbulent times.
Everyone who wants to choose sensibly and with hope, and everyone who wants to be a candidate, should read this indispensable biography. You feel Colombia beating in its pages.
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