This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.

At the end of this judicious and finely reasoned essay on which I here comment, Eduardo Pizarro recommends reading and rereading the book of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. But in the face of his urgent wake-up call about our ailing democracy, already confined in an intensive care unit (ICU) from which few patients come out alive, I am afraid that his analysis and those of these two illustrious professors would only help us to help our dying democracy to “die well”, as they used to say. It would be of little use to us to continue reading and memorizing the clinical details of that epsilon variant of the lethal virus that is killing all Latin American democracies: the growing feeling of both those who vote and those who abstain that no one represents us or can represent us. Therefore, it could be concluded that electoral democracy is corrupted and a farce, then that all public corporations are dens of phonies and, even worse, of corrupt people, and that we will not vote for any of them. Impeccable reasoning of the young people?

This is how Pizarro continues in his final conclusions: “What is desirable is that Colombia manages to overcome the factors that are feeding the polarization and the immanent risks of a national fracture through a new political leadership that has the capacity not to divide, but to build national consensus based on a program of democratic convergence.” Sound advice from grandparents?