¿Quién es, o quiénes son el pueblo?

0:06 I' m Roberto Pombo. Welcome to my questions, an average rush program sponsored by KFAM, family compensation box. The people are an ethereal concept that is difficult to define and that is why the politicians have been so hands- on who the people are. The people are always right for this chapter. We spoke with journalist María Elvira Samper, with the director of the Democracy Studies Group of the University of Rosario, Jean Basset, with the House Representative, David Rasero, and with Senator Humberto de la Calle, I am Roberto Pombo, and this is chapter eighty- three of my questions welcome. Within the fundamental questions and questions of humanity is the existence of God. For some it is not a possibility, but a resounding fact. If you do not believe in God by mere exercise, suppose for an instant that there is now what you believe God wants from us. The interpretations and answers are multiple, not to say infinite. It depends on which sacred book you read or even which verse or chapter you read. The answer can change and is that, while there are some commandments, at least in Christianity, their interpretations are several.

1:26 But let' s go to the Bible, let' s do the exercise of seeing what God wants, what directions he gives. In most cases we read your instructions through someone else. What the Book of Jeremiah says he told him, or what Abakuk says he responded to him through a vision, or what Abdias says he told the people of Edom that he had said to him and so let us think for a moment about the Shabbat, the day when God commands the human to rest and sanctify him. The guide is not rest. The bat appears in the Bible and the Torah. However, Catholics and Jews make a different interpretation of God' s indications. Or go to Islam.

2:08 This religion has the Sharia, a book that is based on the Koran and that is something like the moral and legal framework of that religion. This book establishes a path for moral life, but not a set of laws, in particular, so its interpretation is rather lax and has been the subject of debate for a long time. I also have in mind the use of the word of God that has been made to justify atrocities such as the hitmen who pray their bullets, or like the Holy Inquisition, which perceived and tortured scientists and prominent figures in the name of faith and martyred the so- called witches. God' s word is rarely direct and concrete. That is why the phrase a little exculpatory that says God' s ways are mysterious. However, God’ s word, despite its lack of clarity, is deley in many cases. So there is an ancient Latin expression that was coined centuries ago.

3:06 Box Populi, Box Day. The voice of the people is the voice of God to refer to a sacred command. On that basis political systems have grown or at least democracies, the most popular system or at least on paper in almost every country of the world, as almost everyone learns in the College, that democracy is the power or regime of the people. Let' s say it means people and crates, which means power. I am not going to review what democracy is or how it was born, but it has to be said that that people who participated in democracy had some limits. It excluded women, foreigners, slaves, and was only considered to be citizens, men over the age of twenty, children of Athenian father and mother. Since then, this concept of people has been extended until the people have listened to each other.

4:00 All of us have the power as soon as we are grouped together as a group with similar characteristics. However, the concept remains vague or broad, as God’ s word has thought to whom politicians and academics refer. When they refer to the people, it comes to mind, for example, in the Gettinsburg speech, one of the most important given by the American provocateur Abraham Lincoln, and which closes with the phrase to Brocomillas and that the government of the people, by the people and for the people will not disappear from the face of the earth. I' m closing Comillas. In his famous narrow speech, Simon Bolivar repeats the village about thirty- four times. But don ' t go that far. The Charter of the United Nations begins with its preamble, as we the peoples of the United Nations say. And, if we look at a more local case, just beginning our political constitution, the one of the ninety- one article three tells Borocomillas resides exclusively in the people from which public power emanates. The people exercise it directly or through their representatives in accordance with the terms established by the Constitution. I' m closing Comillas.

5:12 This is perhaps the most open and most used word in politics, always spoken with a certain mysticism and solemnity, but perhaps the most iconic phrase that best captures what has become the concept of the people. It was told by the murdered liberal politician Jorge Liez. The gaitan personally leaves there' s a bologna that sticks to me, because it' s still like this. The randa, the gift. The interpretations of the phrase are several, especially if we stick to representative democracy, because a country is headed by a congressional politician mayor governor or president to lead on his behalf, because he sees reflected in that person his will. So, if the leaders and politicians represent the people and their will, the decisions made by a politician in the name of his votes are justified. I looked for Senator Humberto from the street to help me answer these questions, and this he told me at the beginning. Democracy was direct democracy. The Greeks gathered in the agora and there we made the decisions.

6:21 But since that became impossible, things became more complex, more difficult. Representative democracy is emerging. Then the people intervene through some representatives. Now the validity of that representation is not questioned in what we call liberal democracies. There are basically two systems on the value or mandatory or non- binding nature of people' s decisions. In some countries, the representative, that is, the congressman, has to obey the directives of his voters. In other places it is said that the congressman seeks the common good, but he is the one who judges that it is the common good and makes his decisions freely.

7:08 But in any case, within democracies, what Congress decides, as a representative legitimately chosen by the people, is the voice of the people and is therefore obligatory. The Italian researcher Giovanni Sartori has already asked similar questions and has developed the topic of the important question, Who are we or are the people. For these arthor has six possible interpretations. The first is the people as literally everyone. The second is an approximate plurality, i e a majority. The third is that of the people as a populace, that is, the lower classes or the proletariat. The fourth is an organic and indivisible whole, the fifth is the people as an absolute majority and the sixth is as a moderate majority. The question depends on who is asked, especially when it comes to politicians, as I said before, since many countries live in democracy and it is the people who choose their rulers. Many leaders and choose to believe that then the people are the people who elected them their voters, who make up that people have changed, because those who voted before were men over twenty- one years old with properties and married and the group opened up to enslaved people, illiterate and scarce resources, like women, until today, when except non - nationalized foreigners, minors, internees or military, all can vote. This

8:39 group of people is what economist Joseph Chupiter considered the people, those who have the right to vote and who de facto rule. However, you like me will have asked the same question. Do people who cannot vote as minors, the security forces or those held in prisons do not belong to the people? Well, in this case there is another principle, nationality. So the people are the same as a nation and its boundaries and borders are the same. The people share the same national identity and, in this case, of all Colombians born nationalized, we are part of that famous people. So far it seems that there is a clear and concrete answer to the question and then the rest of this chapter can be replaced with musical programming. The people are all Colombians or the inhabitants of each nation. But I wish everything was so simple in politics, even in democracies, the people change according to the interests of whoever has the power, and I can think of several examples of this.

9:46 We go to the year two thousand sixteen. Donald Trump, in a campaign speech for his re- election, told Urocomillas the only important thing is the unification of the people, because the others mean nothing. I close quotes to who was referring to Trump with those extras, the answer is simple. Those who did not vote for him, undocumented immigrants and African- Americans. Then, as opposed to the people, to the demos, a new side is created, a shadow within the same nation, we, the people, against you. And that' s not something new at all. Creating another is also part of creating an identity one of us. Ah and his rival in the campaign didn' t fall behind. Democrat candidate Girary Clinton made some rather subligate statements about Trump' s followers saying they could get half of them into a pitiful basket. Sping Grouse Lee Jean robertsteck I was heff of Trumps of forters Cent wharrack of basketf the Parable. This is best explained by the Spanish writer and essayist Jesús Ferrero, in his text, when he says that people tend to exclude and are part of his subject. The peoples imaginaryally create different degrees of humanity and history is full of cases that reaffirm what Ferrero says.

11:07 Just look at the horror of the Nazi holocaust or the South African paradise. But I am referring to these two particular cases, because we are talking about Germans against Germans and South Africans against South Africans, that is, citizens of the same country against themselves. In other words, the people against the people. Usually, these others are the opposite of the people, to the real people and here we begin to talk about a well- known word popurism. The German polytoelo Jean Werner Müller explains this in an article to Urocomillas. What really distinguishes the populist is an affirmation that he and he alone represent the real people. As Trump explained, as the executive now controls, the people control the government by implication all illegitimate oppositions and if you oppose Trump, you oppose the people. I' m closing Comillas. Something similar happened several years ago, in a thousand nine hundred and ninety- eight, when the then presidential candidate of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, began his campaign with the proposal of a constituent national assembly, with the slogan with Chávez commands the people chabes I am no longer a chaver is a people tucked in with the tunic of popular support is dangerous. We have already seen it in all political trends. In fact, the slogan of the last presidential campaign of the far- right Jair Bolsonaro was Captain Dupovo, who translates captain of the village. The music of his

12:39 campaign seems to be that of one of the North Korean leaders, songs in which, among other things, they say that he is of God and that there was never anyone like him. On this there is a rather interesting academic work, entitled we the people who analyze who the people are. According to the Twitter account of the former Brazilian president. One of the authors' analyses is that the people appear as an idealized, pure category vilified by the aristocracy in its most basic rights. It is the populist' s duty to restore those rights to the people. But its power can only be conceived in democratic regimes, in principle by the will of that very people. And so it is considered that there are three main elements at the heart of populism, the people, the elite or elites and the popular will. And, therefore, populism requires that the people it claims to represent be recognized in it and place their trust and vows in it. And that conviction implies, through communication, that this movement is established with what identifies as the true people or the common people, that is, the citizenry composed of the excluded, the oppressed and the forgotten. However, the tendency to own the total representation of the people ends up generating more division than unity over these or ns. A recent column by writer Juan Esteban Constantin, in which he wonders who is the dream of that popular force, who defines it and answers it himself. What is difficult

14:09 to say to Brocomillas, because fascism also consists in that, in that a movement is attributed to the brave the power to point out from its ideas and prejudices, what are the scope of the concept of the people and who are excluded from it, which is a political and moral contradiction, because the essence of the people, its premise is that we are all there. Cierro Comillas I moved to journalist Mara Forgets Samper the question how the concept of people has served populisms. This told me the term village is an ambiguous, complex, equivocal and multivo term, with at the same time and also, controversial term to land here in the region. I believe that the concept of people is key to populism, especially for the left populism that conceives it, not as our Constitution does in its third article, which includes us all, but as the whole of the excluded, of the marginalized, of those who suffer the abuse of corrupt elites. It should now be said that populist discourse is in some way rooted in the limitations or shortcomings of democracy and thus makes the people a strategic, political and social actor, a homogeneous identity. Even if it isn' t. I believe that in that sense, the people is a functional construction to that binary discourse that divides society into two, into oppressed people and into the oppressive or slave ligarchy to say it in the terms of President Gustavo pt The people then are not a homogeneous unity with shared identity, they

15:43 are heterogeneous and changing and so I believe that no one can appropriate their representation, which is what the populist leader does that right there, ignores institutional restrictions, which is the gateway to authoritarianism and many times to dictation. The people serve the populist leader to manipulate and instrumentalize, but also to exclude and ignore institutions and evade mechanisms of reblessing accounts. So the term people is functional to many ideologies and to many leaders, either from left to right, but especially to those on the left, as we have seen in Latin America. And for more examples, because there is Correa, there is Chávez, there is Maduro, Calula, it is evo. Morales. In short, examples about the beginning of the program mentioned the famous vox saying Populi vox Day, which translates the voice of the people is the voice of God in many ways that the people, at least understanding it as the winning majority, are absolutely right.

16:45 It' s not that simple or that good. The first example is that the Ochile son says it shows that, according to respondents, the rights of the vast majority of the population should be prioritized over the rights of criminals. Twenty- seven percent of respondents believe that in order to stop a necessary criminal from going over some of his human rights, and forty percent think that the government should worry more about the human rights of Chileans than about immigrants. The same measurement showed that, although it is clear that the majority of Chileans are committed to democracy in certain crises, sixty percent of respondents mention that authoritarianism is justified in one of the following circumstances, human rights violations, increased corruption in compliance with laws or uncontrolled crime, and the data continue. According to the World Barometer of Open Society Foundations, forty- two percent of the under - sixs worldwide believe that the best political regime is a military dictatorship and thirty - five percent would prefer to live in a pro- authoritarian civilian regime, without division of powers or an effective parliamentary system. In Colombia, thirty- nine percent of those interviewed said they prefer to be governed by a leader who dispenses with parliamentary elections. According to the Latin study Barómetro two thousand twenty- three, thirty- three percent of Mexicans think that an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one. And in local terms, the issue is serious.

18:19 In Colombia, eighty percent of the population is dissatisfied with the democracy that is being managed and support for this type of government is only forty- eight percent and many leaders seem to be aware of those wishes. A few months ago, Juanita Gebertus, director for America at Human Ride Watch, in an interview with the German media Doichevelle said that there is a loss of confidence in democracy, of a crowding of many leaders who are willing to transgress the separation of powers and continue to erode the rule of law. There are some cases in which the most authoritarian governments enjoy great popular support, as is the case with the Salvador and the prisoner' s government in Ti Bukelli, which has solved the one that was a serious security problem, that the detriment of the human and civil rights of many citizens of that country. Like the arbitrary detention of thousands of people. According to a May report last year by the NGO Cristo Sal Since the beginning of the state of emergency, at least one hundred and sixty pesos have died bau state custody. But these allegations and many more human rights organizations do not affect Buckeli' s popularity. According to the study by Latino Barómetro already cited, the Salvadoran President is the Latin American president with the highest approval. I am not going to refer to other cases of authoritarian governments today, such as those of Ortega in Nicaragua or Maduro in Venezuela, because they, contrary to bukele, enjoy little popularity. In the case of Nicaragua, according to a Galoub poll last year, seventy percent of citizens believe

19:51 that the country is heading the wrong way and in Venezuela, according to a poll by Delphi and the Center for Political Studies and Go Government of the Catholic University Andrés Bello, eighty- five percent of the country wants a change. The world is full of terrible governments for many reasons, with very low popularity and vice versa, of good governments that fail to seduce the people. For some that democracy is always right is like saying that the client is always right. For example, for Aristotle, the fatal problem of democracy is that it divides society by confronting the majority, even if it is not far superior to the minority. Seven years ago, Julián Bagini' s Ph D wrote about this in an article in t de guardan a urocomillas. Western democracy is built around tripartite trust, trust in the people to hold the Government accountable and set the overall direction of politics, but also trust in politicians to make specific decisions than institutions, to provide safeguards for hasty or tyrannical contractions. What we are seeing throughout the Western world is that the last two pillars are being torn down, leaving all confidence, resting on the people I close quotes. According to Bagini, democracy has been useful to us, because it is not democracy as it conceived the ancient Greeks. For him, what we call democracy is actually a representative system of government that leaves most important decisions to elected leaders. At

21:25 this point he cannot stop thinking if again in the referendum for peace canuel. However, in my view, it was not the right decision, even though the majority wanted it to be. Finally, that is what democracy is all about, to believe, to respect the voice of the people. At this point I wonder then the people are always right. I conveyed the concern to the director of the democracy study group at the University of Rosario, Professor Jan Bassette. Well, democracy is a regime based on the primacy of pop sovereignty, which does not exactly mean that the people are always right. In fact, it does not make much sense to put it this way, but it does mean that all government actions in a democracy must be justified according to the will of the people, their interests, their needs. What happens is that we do not have an absolutely accurate method of determining once and for all what this will of the people is and, in fact, we have a debate of never, never end up in a democracy about really what the will of the people is, what their needs are, and even a debate about what exactly the people are, if it is the whole world, if it is the majority, if it is the popular sectors for that people, if it is the national ones, unlike the foreign ones, etcetera, etcetera. So, this truly indefinable character of the people makes democracy pluralist and, in reality,

22:57 a sort of competing Henry various ideas about what the people want and what the people need. The President Petru on many occasions has not resisted the caudilloist temptation to feel the anointed of the people. He has repeatedly called on the grassroots, his voters to demonstrate to support the reforms he promised and which, as he says, are the mandate given to him by the people to govern. He has repeated several times that the approximately eleven million people who voted for him in the second round are the people and those who do not support him are the oligarchy or simply the right. Adrián Restrepo is a PhD in social sciences and a professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Antioquia and writes a text that asks which people the President refers to and, among other things, tells Burou Comillas the leader, the President, has to define the adversary or even the enemy of the people, the angpueblo. For this he uses broad denominations such as the orinarchy, the dominant groups, the establishment and others that allow the leader to shelter with them those whom he considers to be opponents. Likewise, the leader, the President, must define the adversary or even the enemy of the people. Cierro Comillas, the people that the President constantly invokes are the poor and the excluded from the country. However, to believe that all poor studies in the country support it is as much reductionist as to think that all people with money or more affluent classes. They'

24:32 re conservative right- wingers. Let' s nail that town of yours that he claims to represent. President Petro referred to a few weeks ago when he launched a balloon on a possible constituent Colombia. You don' t have to kneel. The popular triumph of two thousand two is respected and the constituent National Assembly must transform the institutions. The popular vote that President Petro is constantly talking about and with which he always counts are those more than eleven million that we have mentioned on other occasions. He has argued, for example, what aurocomillas. That is why the Constitution of the ninety- one, made by a constituent in its first article, says that the source of Sovereignty is the people and that is why the stanza of the national anthem we sing every day.

25:21 He says that it is the people of the sovereign Cerro Comillas and also recently the OAS published a statement requesting respect for the President' s mandate and said in its account of x auro Comillas what sectors outside the Supreme Court of Justice and linked to drug trafficking and corruption have explicitly attempted is not to allow the mandate that the people granted by popular vote. So citizenship has every right to organize itself democratically and peacefully. I close Comillas and, of course, in this case, the President is absolutely right. However, it does not cease to cause my concern who is the people referred to by President Petrú after the question to the House Representative, David Rasero, and this told me the people category has three fundamental elements. The first most important has to do with the self- awareness of those who differ politically from the small group that has held political and economic power. What Gaitan in the past spoke of liberal and conservative oligarchy, but Ligarchy and the people were built with the notion of being the opposites of that ligarchy. Today that idea is taken up again people are those who are different from those who have always kidnapped the State. The second vision has to do with oneness from the plural. It is a singular plural is the unified mass from diversity peoples. They are the great majorities that unite from

26:55 their differences in function of a cause, in function precisely against getting into the league. It' s a crowd. And third, it has to do with capacity and agency. The people are only people while they are able to move, to mobilize, to act. If it is a people that does not move, that does not act, it is completely meaningless. I' ll conclude with an obviousness. There is no consensus on who or who the people are. The answer will change depending on who you ask. The people are all Colombians, the people are those who support the government in turn, the people are those who have rights, or the people are certain classes, the proletariat or the most enlightened. But there is one conclusion that we can come to, and that is that, like the word of God, the people' s concert has been handled by all for their convenience. I' ll take that town. We are totus, the Colombians and the politicians who represent us have the task of working for all, without distinction from political parties or thought. I am Roberto Pombo and this was chapter eighty- three of my questions. See you in the next chapter from now on. This chapter of my questions is available on all podcast platforms. This episode was made possible by Kafan. Family compensation box. Dirección Roberto Pombo, Producción General Juan Abel Gutiérrez, editorial advisor, Daniel San Pedro Espina, scripts juan Abel Gutiérrez and

28:27 Johnny Rodríguez. Field production Marcela Salazar and Lucía Beltrán audio postproduction Carlos Bernar