The headlines are grim, yet predictable. Colombia, a country that has spent half a century gnawing at its own flesh, now finds its presidential election consumed by the very violence it hoped to escape. British analysts, ever eager to diagnose the world’s maladies, have declared that the current campaign is ‘defined’ by the country’s brutal civil strife. How original. How terribly, terribly obvious.
We are told that the ghosts of past massacres, the shadow of narcoterrorism, and the spectre of leftist guerrillas now haunt the hustings. Candidates speak of peace, but their hands are stained. Voters dream of stability, but their streets run with blood. It is a tragedy of classical proportions, the sort that would make Edward Gibbon weep. For what is Colombia’s saga if not a modern echo of Rome’s fall? A republic torn apart by faction, greed, and the failure of its elite to uphold the common good.
The parallel is almost too neat. Like the late Roman Empire, Colombia suffers from a catastrophic breakdown of order. The state, weak and corrupt, cannot enforce its monopoly on violence. Armed groups, whether drug cartels or Marxist insurgents, carve out their satrapies. The people, exhausted and cynical, retreat into private loyalties: family, clan, gang. This is not democracy. This is feudalism with automatic weapons.
And what of the intellectuals, you ask? The pundits, the academics, the British analysts who so solemnly diagnose the crisis? They speak of ‘post-conflict’ and ‘transitional justice’ as if these incantations could exorcise the demons. But they miss the deeper rot. Colombia’s tragedy is not merely political; it is moral. A society that tolerates such brutality for so long has lost its soul. It has become decadent, in the fullest sense of the word: a culture that no longer believes in itself, that sees violence as inevitable, that has given up on the idea of a shared national project.
This is the real story of the Colombian election. It is not about policies or personalities. It is about a civilisation in decay, struggling to find a reason to continue. The candidates promise peace, but they cannot deliver because the people no longer desire it with sufficient passion. They have grown accustomed to the horror. They have made a dark peace with the abyss.
And so, as the world watches Colombia’s descent, we should not be surprised. We have seen this before. In Rome, in the Weimar Republic, in a dozen failed states. The lesson is always the same: a nation that forgets its founding virtues will perish. Colombia has forgotten. The question is whether it can remember before it is too late. Or perhaps, like so many empires before it, it is already too late, and we are merely watching the final act of a very old play.