Latinos look serios

Laws and institutions, on the one hand, and that of an unleashed and chaotic reality, on the other.

In the images you see some policemen "Colombian karate fighters"

and a policeman disguised as a papaya because in Colombia "giving papaya" means being easy to steal.

That's how absurd we are.
Latinos look serious

One of the essential features of Spanish-American society, since the Conquest, was that of pretense and simulation: the formal celebration of a paper world that had nothing to do with life, "the days that one after the other are life... ”.

The 'invention of America', as Edmundo O'Gorman called it, implied this contrasting narrative: that of laws and institutions, on the one hand, and that of an unleashed and chaotic reality, on the other.

All of Latin America works the same way. Something is said in the laws, but life is chaotic in everything.

That is why many gringos believe that taxes are collected here because they read about it on the internet. But the reality is that states have no control over their citizens. If you don't want to pay taxes, you don't pay them and that's it.

The problem was this: that America was a literary and legal construction conceived and regulated, to the last fold, with minutiae and detail, from the Metropolis, but its nature was a geographical and human torrent that overflowed all the channels and all the molds that they wanted to impose themselves on him.

There were two simultaneous and enemy realities: that of paper, solemn and deceitful; that of the street, ungovernable and scorching.

That is why the rituals of power in the colonial world so often turned out to be so empty, because they were that (which is not a small thing, too): a formula, a symbol, a way of ingratiating oneself with that version of reality that was only in the laws.

Meanwhile, life was going in other directions: life had other resources and other methods that made everything unfold between its formal enunciation and its most intimate truth. It is obeyed but not fulfilled, that's how it was.

Think, for example, of the police checkpoints, with which this country is flooded without any sense or purpose beyond that of the fiction of authority: the institutional and false idea that this is how things work well, damn it, this is how order is imposed in the Republic.

The checkpoints are the official version of another very Colombian practice that is very useful and necessary, that of showing the receipt to the 'guard' when leaving the supermarket.

And as many predicted from the beginning, the authoritarian and delusional feast that the pandemic imposed has, perhaps inevitably, also left a legacy of absurd restrictions that are maintained here only to preserve an idea of ​​rigor and seriousness that is rather pathetic. demonstration that we are missing completely, and forever, both. Our pretense of seriousness, rather, is worse than our lack of seriousness.

In Colombia, street vendors wore face masks. Can you believe people here make 2 dollars a day but with masks for fear of covid.

All to appear serious. Obviously they used the same mask for 6 months full of bacteria but it was important to use it because of the "Covid".

We have always been a country that seems serious.

In Canada it is understood why they took the covid seriously. It is a serious country with money, drinking water, etc.

But here people are starving but with the mask on haha ​​absurd.