Source: El Tiempo - Colombia - 26/07/2010

My first Christmas gifts for the Niño Dios de San Antonio del Táchira. This mix of San Andresito and Miami has the generation of my priests to buy contraband, as they call out the treasures that were not available in the national market: radiolas, transistors, porcelains and the uncountable Cocosetes. This is speaking of ancient times of protectionism, when globalization was a word that was unknown to us as a transistor for young people. But, moreover, it is anecdotic, I am talking about a common history, so entertaining and conflicting as the fraternal relationships or the Venezuelan culebrones that entertained us in adolescence.

It seems like a perverse parade that, just now, when the military speeches and military parades have ceased to be celebrations of Bicentennial and amenazan with war taking place, the inhabitants of the Colombian-Venezuelan border have ten reasons to celebrate. He had to stop at Villa del Rosario, huddle in front of the ruins of this cathedral in which the members of the First Congress of the Constitution of Gran Colombia met in 1821, once after that flower, and read the commemorative plaque that reminds us that there, “the democratic appearance of other countries was defined and the perpetuity of its fraternal Bolivarian understanding was sold”.

There would be a minute of silence in this Park in Gran Colombia and blooming - would you laugh? - in front of the ruins of that integrationist sueño, but the same cathedral destroyed by the 1875 earthquake. the same tamarindo that housed conversations and misunderstandings between Santander and Bolívar, and today continue refreshing the families that had a pie in Colombia and other in Venezuela (like having the face of a cucumber mother and the priest of San Cristobal) and they are related and have shared pupitre, as he housed in Pamplona Carlos Andrés Pérez and Virgilio Barco.

Our bilious presidents and their fearful and diplomatic decorators must know that in Cúcuta the people are not saluting asking "how do you get there?", Bell "How do you get the bolívar?" Venezuela, which prepares similar plates, then hallacas or tamales. And that, in the Bucaramanga truck to Cúcuta, it is impossible to find gas stations, because Colombian vehicles - unless you have official signs - move with the smuggling train in the pimpinas. And I should know that Venezuelans shop in modern commercial centers and that there is a currency exchange deal called Conexiones Gran Colombia and a taxi co-operative in a called Peace without Borders… And that these names are not irrelevant to the coincidences of the expressions of a relationship, which also takes place in La Guajira and in Llanos, in which deals are made with placer, the best and the least on each side, as in any other country.

And they should know that we pay for them: to manage our relationships, and that they include our eternal migratory conflicts, since the lack of hospitality that previously was dispensed with the illegal domestic jobs that we exported, there is even the excess that is offered to our guerrilla workers. . And they must remember that what they consider to be hypocritical hypocritical diplomatic channels are supported by others to deal with the differences. And that “the theme of the background”, as the Bermúdez cancellation calls for, is perhaps the one that diagnosed a border taxi driver: “What new presidents do not want and we have to wait for them”. Everything else: from problems, bases, illegal groups, cooperation, migration, derechist tendencies and foreign policy could take over foreign policy. Supposing that there was, which is technically impossible with the presidents who entertained themselves playing the war, the coast of their people.
Yolanda Reyes