Disparition

November 14, 2023 / Gustavo Forero

I

Mais t’es où ? Tu te caches ? On te retient ? Tu respires encore quelque part ? T’es toujours vivant ou on t’a déjà enterré ? Te caches-tu à l’intérieur de ce qui reste de la photo dans ce journal qui se délite entre mes mains ? Je te cherche, mais personne n’a de tes nouvelles. Ça m’est égal d’être confronté ou exposé à ceux tiennent à savoir où tu es : je m’époumone à leur répondre : mais il est où ? Je les regarde droit dans les yeux, ta photo accrochée à mon cou. J’enquête dans la rue, auprès des avocats, des juges, des journalistes, des truands, des étrangers… Évidemment, je me cache parfois par peur, mais je regarde cette photo qui me dit que tu n’es pas tout à fait mort. Et me voilà bringuebalé par la douleur et l’espoir. Et comme une rengaine je répète : mais t’es où ? Tu te caches ? Tu respires encore quelque part ? Es-tu là ou n’es-tu qu’un souvenir ?

Lovers and destroyers. A History of Anarchism

July 20, 2020 / Gustavo Forero

Foreword

In August 1907 two major events took place in Holland: the First Anarchist Congress, in Amsterdam, and the Second International Peace Conference, in The Hague. The first one was intended to bring together the rebels around the world in order to undertake a social revolution; meanwhile, the second sought to establish the strategic guidelines of an "armed peace" for the benefit of the imperial powers. Despite the evident imminence of a war, none of these meetings raised international policies to prevent the disaster that finally broke out on July 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Two Colombians of dissimilar origins concur then in the Netherlands: Vicente Lizcano (also known as Biófilo Panclasta), a transhumant rebel, allegedly Jewish, who traveled from Buenos Aires on behalf of the Argentine Regional Workers Federation to the Anarchist Congress, and Santiago Pérez Triana, a diplomat and skilled arms dealer (and the son of former president Santiago Pérez Manosalva) who was part of the official delegation of Colombia at the Peace Conference. A letter from the Dutch government sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia announcing the arrest in this country of one of its representatives for participating in a dynamite attack threatens to disrupt international diplomacy and causes a political incident that serves as a pretext to understand the infamy of Western reality.

Comment 0 Likes

Disappearance

September 11, 2014 / Gustavo Forero

I

Where are you? Are you hiding, have you been hidden? Are you still breathing somewhere? Are you alive or are you already in the grave and in what is left of the picture in the newspaper that is falling apart in my hands? I look for you, but no one had heard from you. It doesn’t bother me anymore to face or expose myself to those who must know your whereabouts: I scream in their faces, “Where is she?” I stand right in front of them, I hang your picture around my neck, I make demands in the street, before lawyers, before judges, before journalists, of thugs, of foreigners… Of course, sometimes I hide in fear, but I see this picture of you that proves you did not die inside, and I am shaken by pain and hope, and I begin again: Where are you? Are you hiding, have you been hidden? Are you still breathing somewhere? Are you alive, or are you just my memory now?