“…,political leaders and the mass media have succeeded in publicly denigrating poor Black mothers as the undeserving, criminal poor.” (Goodman, 2018. P.117)

And we have bought it. They both (politicians and the media) keep selling us alienation of “the other” and we keep buying it. I come from a passionate country that sees no gray scales in its passion: passionate hate or passionate love. It wouldn’t be so terrible if it didn’t come with an uneducated crowd that keeps voting with the hatred side of their passion (and the prop$ that come with it). In 2002 that unconscious crowd elected a dictator under a disguised democracy. He corruptly got himself re-elected in 2006 and decades later keeps placing puppets in power to do the dirty job and pay for it to, while he remains untouched and immaculate, sitting as a congressman moving pieces into the most convenient ladders and pushing the useless down the snakes.
Among his many sins, the called “falsos positivos” in army slang, is to my eyes by far the worst. He decided to put a price on every guerrilla rebel’s head, the way Pablo Escobar put a price on police officers’ heads back in the dark 90’s. Soldiers from the Colombian army went to the poorest possible neighborhoods in the forgotten barrios of Bogota (among other cities), where they lured teenagers at risk with the promise of work to other cities that were miles away. The soldiers filled trucks with these “second class citizens” that would be missed by no one (because who can miss the poor), drove them for hours to where they were bound to have a war encounter, murdered them, dressed their corps with guerrilla uniforms and declared them rebel fighters in order to boost their stats in the war against leftist insurgents.The suspiciously inflated numbers, wrongly called “false positives”, got the officers and troops who carried out the executions rewards in the shape of money, promotions or vacation time. They also justified United States aid military packages, which have been helping keep the business of war alive for so long. It was the mothers of these children (because most of them were still on their teens) who made this visible and stood for their sons to say that they were not undeserving, nor were their criminals, even if they were poor. These extrajudicial executions made me feel the hopelessness that was woken again by this painful chapter 5 in the book “It’s not about Grit”. How much longer can we take?