Lately it actually seems like Antanas Mockus has a serious chance of becoming the president of Colombia. The poll by El Tiempo and La W says that Mockus would get 38.7% of the vote in the first round compared to Juan Manuel Santos’ 26.7%, Noemí Sanín’s 9.8%, German Vargas Lleras’ 3.3%, Gustavo Petro’s 2.8%, and Rafael Pardo’s 2.3%. On the second round, if Mockus and Santos are the two choices, Mockus gets a 41% to Santos’ 29%. The poll by CM& shows Mockus getting 34% of the vote to Santos’ 35% in the first round; however, in the second round, Mockus gets 50% to Santos’ 44%. An Invamer Gallup poll showed Santos winning the first round but Mockus getting 47% of the vote in the second round versus Santos’ 42%.

For an election that seemed like it existed merely as a formality just a few weeks ago, these results are a shock, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that barely three months ago almost no one really contemplated four years without Uribe himself, let alone there being a reasonable chance of his successor not taking power. The trends are favoring Mockus. It seems like in every poll, he’s getting closer and closer to Santos, now even surpassing him, even though not much has really changed. Mockus hasn’t done anything visible since selecting Sergio Fajardo as his vicepresident. He hasn’t really shined during the debates (which isn’t to say he performed poorly; he simply did as well as some of the other candidates who are getting negligible votes), and he’s had a few public slip-ups, the type that would be a giant media event in the United States but luckily get glossed over here. Santos isn’t bleeding voters, but it doesn’t really seem like he’s going to get higher numbers anytime soon. He already has his followers; people who want continuity already know he exists, whereas Mockus is still getting his name and status as the frontrunner opposition candidate out there.

The last time I got excited for a political candidate, the candidate himself wasn’t terribly great. Mockus is better, but the same principle applies. I’m not really expecting a Mockus victory, and even if he does win the elections, I’m not sure his presidency would be entirely successful, or even successful at all. But in a lot of ways, this election is like the Obama election. It was important then for people to vote for an idea, and against an idea, and such is the case here too.

Uribe’s government, and by extension Santos’ campaign, is based on the idea of Democratic Security, which really doesn’t mean a whole lot other than ‘fighting the guerrillas’. That’s his entire thing, really. That’s the premise of Santos’ campaign: we have to continue with security. We have to keep defending ourselves. We have to keep battling.

How true is that? When Santos was the Minister of Defense, Colombians found out that army had been killing civilians and dressing them up as guerrilla fighters, because they could get a financial reward for every body they delivered as a kill. There’s about 1,000 cases known so far, with little in the way of justice. If you think about this, it’s staggering. Hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths goes beyond ‘bad apples’ or ‘isolated incidents’, it’s a reflection of policy. In this case, the policy was to delivery corpses so that people would feel that some ’security’ was being reinforced.

Last year, it was also revealed that the DAS, the Administrative Department of Security, was illegally spying on various opposition politicians, judges, and journalists. Going beyond that, DAS officers were actually harassing people and threatening them with death, in some cases those officers being the ones assigned to ‘protect’ those people in the first place. The director of DAS, Jorge Noguera, was arrested because he was found to have collaborated with paramilitary groups in order to divert DAS resources to some of their activities, including murder.

While no one denies that there were some security improvements during Uribe’s presidency, the aforementioned incidents are a very serious matter. They are not something that can be brushed off and ignored. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that under Uribe, the State and its various agencies became a bigger threat to citizens’ lives than they had been in the previous governments. That’s something that should be cause for concern, because there is a difference between the government, which supposedly represents the people and is placed in power by their votes, and guerrilla groups. There is a degree of moral culpability that we all share if our government is going around threatening and murdering people, which isn’t the case when it’s an external agent.

And yet, these events didn’t destroy Uribe’s presidency, and they haven’t destroyed Santos’ candidacy. Uribe was weakened, sure. But realistically speaking, if he had been able to run for a third term, he would have won, and Santos is still in very good position to take the Presidency. Why is that? Why has Uribe been a ‘teflon’ president?

Uribe has been worshipped during his entire presidency, sometimes in ways that were vaguely creepy. He wasn’t merely a president; he was a savior. I’ve heard more than a few people say Uribe is the best president of any country, for example. Or the best president in the history of Colombia, a claim that’s not entirely unreasonable coming from people who have only experienced National Front presidents and the dubious failures that followed, but hardly realistic, especially as more scandals come to light.

I believe that many colombians needed an Uribe, regardless of who he actually was. They needed this great savior figure, one that would help them fight against evil and help them survive. The two presidencies before Uribe’s were absolutely terrible. Samper’s presidency was spent almost completely in court when it was revealed that drug traffickers had financed his campaign. Pastrana’s presidency had tried a peace process that ended up being a resounding failure, showed the guerrilla group FARC to be wholly uninterested with the concept of peace and demostrated that they held incredible disdain towards colombians (FARC leader Marulanda infamously didn’t go to the first peace process meeting, and the photograph of Pastrana next to an empty chair became the defining image of the years). Colombians were being kidnapped at record levels, the state couldn’t guarantee anyone’s security, and the country seemed like it was becoming unlivable.

People needed this idea of a Great Man that would swoop in and save them. And in a way, Uribe did. The government fought against FARC, and security improved in the country. But to what cost? Besides the previously mentioned government scandals, there’s the fact that paramilitary groups took over vast regions of the country for many years, including Congress and in all likelihood the Casa de Nariño (presidential palace), and in the process committed a vast number of atrocities that are almost unspeakable in their depravity. The real tragedy of the paramilitary phenomenon is how much support it had from society, tacit and hidden support, but support nonetheless. Even not too long ago, you could still find people arguing “well, the paramilitaries fought the guerrilla, right? so maybe they were good”.

Colombia was in one of those moral quandaries. How far are you willing to go for protection? People were willing to go very far, and they simply looked the other way and downplayed or refused to acknowledge any terrible thing that happened. That’s why Uribe is a teflon president. Vast numbers of people have simply never been interested in seeing his government for what it really is, because they need to know they are being protected, they need to know they have nothing to fear anymore. And in the process, the country’s fallen even lower into the pit of immorality it was already in.

Like most other countries, we have our narrative, and it requires us to be ‘good’. The fight against FARC is such a narrative. It’s a view of the world in which colombians are good people, and they have an external enemy, which is FARC, and they are undoubtedly bad. We, the good, struggle against these evil forces, always ready to strike. It’s no big secret that rallying the people against a common enemy can be used to justify a lot, but like everything in the world, people can identify in others what they’re unable to see in themselves. There are some billboards against Antanas Mockus that have appeared in the past few days, and their premise is basically that under a Mockus government, other evil external forces (Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa) will defeat us. It’s us against them, and if it’s not Chavez, or FARC, there’ll be a new Other to fight.

As Colombia’s become more and more poisoned, lots of people have simply refused to look within themselves and challenge their assumption about how good the country really is. How good can a country be if it’s willing to turn a blind eye to the executions of hundreds of civilians by the military, to the point where people would consider rewarding such an act with a vote? Many of the things that happened in the country had the general approval of the population, and a lot of these scandals aren’t seen as so bad. What gives? Fear?

A big part of Mockus’ surge is simply that he’s the opposition candidate. As soon as Mockus got the push he needed to get a bigger part of the vote than the other opposition candidates, his numbers started increasing dramatically until the point where he’s now the frontrunner in various polls. Could another opposition candidate have achieved this?

Maybe. I do think, though, that Mockus’ points are precisely what people who are looking deep within themselves are responsive to. His campaign is based on the idea of honesty and legality, and that’s one of the things he’s most known for, being a man with integrity. He’s the antithesis of ‘the ends justifies the means’, the candidate that’s most focused on the substance of those means, and the toll they can take on a country.

The days when anything that happened under Uribe’s administration would be defended to the death have been over for a while. It’s not clear which crisis was the one responsible for this. Maybe it wasn’t a single crisis, but simply the aggregate. Maybe it wasn’t even a crisis, and people are simply tired of Uribe. As the first president to be in power for eight years, he’s had more time to accumulate scandals and failures than the average president, which no doubt has ended up reflecting poorly on him.

Regardless of whether Mockus would manage to succeed in changing the mentality of Colombians, simply winning would be a large change in itself. It would mean colombians are able to look at the reality of their country and work towards fixing it, and themselves, instead of forever focusing on the external enemy. In a few months, we’ll be finding out just how much will there is out there.

In a country that’s had very little choice at the voting booth come presidential election time, a country whose latest president has been in power almost a decade and has massive popular and political support, it’s fitting that an open,  democratic election is going to take place in the coming months as a direct result of the sitting president’s power grab. Uribe’s attempt at running for an unprecedented third term, and all of the drama that arose from the situation, has left the country in its current situation: an upcoming presidential election with half a dozen candidates vying for votes and notoriety, whose alliances might be what makes or breaks them in both the first and second rounds, since clearly no one’s about to win 51% of the vote like Uribe did twice in the past eight years.

The direction of the country in the next four years will be determined in a flash. A longer election campaign with consolidated political party machines would have been a different story. Had Uribe tried to translate his popularity into a leading role for his political party, Partido de la U, they would have surely remained in power. Instead, by trying to remain in power personally, he alienated some of his natural successors, and as a result there isn’t a clear Uribe-approved presidential candidate, with Juan Manuel Santos being the closest after notorious Uribe lapdog Andrés Felipe Arias failed to obtain the Conservative Party nomination.

Santos, Uribe’s former Minister of Defense, is the only candidate in the running that can take credit for the current government’s actions. For a vast number of people, this is unquestionably positive: he’s tough on the guerrillas, he’s associated with some popular actions taken by the military, and he’s been on every television screen for the past four years. For many others, it’s unquestionably negative: the military escapades in Ecuador created international tensions and led to that country’s attempt to capture him via Interpol. Perhaps more gravely, at least inside the country, the military infamously killed hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians from poor neighborhoods, dressed them up as guerrillas, and received monetary compensation for the kills, part of a program that gave rewards to the military based on body count. It remains to be seen how much colombians actually care about it; these “social cleansing” programs, when executed by paramilitary groups, are not always seen negatively.

Visible as he may be, Santos is not a charismatic man. I never really thought Uribe had much charisma either, but he had an image that a lot of people identified with, as the rural leader who liked the fields and was intellectually modest. Which isn’t to say that Uribe was not a well-educated, wealthy man, but the perception is that he’s not part of the political class that colombians have been hating on for quite a while. Santos, on the other hand, is very much a part of them. He’s one of those stuck-up bogotanos from the political world there, who’s changed his politics and hopped in with whoever’s presently popular so many times it’s stunning, even for a country where political convenience is the norm. Santos can wear a hat on commercials all he wants, but it will never be credible the way it was with Uribe. Nothing about the man really communicates anything positive. Shallow as it may be, I’ll say he looks downright creepy.

The rest of the candidates have a history in politics too, many of them having made runs for president before. The number of candidates, the state of the political parties (the Liberal Party in particular at a very weak point), and the redundancy (many of these candidates share the same voting bases) has made most of them weak throughout the admittedly short campaign.

Lately, though, things have been taking a strange turn, one that’s actually exciting and would lead one to think that the country has a reasonable shot at changing course over the next few months. Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, eccentric academic who’s widely respected but who’s never managed to make a dent in his various presidential campaigns, is gaining strenght at the polls. The latest results showed him taking 24% of the vote, to Santos’ 29%, taking over the number two spot from Noemí Sanin (another old politician who’s ran a few times). Mockus is about as different from Santos as you could realistically conceive a candidate to be. The clearest thing about Mockus is that he’s honest. His administrations in Bogotá were remarkably honest, he did his best to steer clear from traditional political tit-for-tat, managed the city’s budget well, and engaged citizens by making them appreciate and respect their city more. His stunts were famous: dressing up as SuperCitizen, having mimes harass errant drivers, sponsoring ladies’ nights out, and more.¹. He’s never been able to present himself as presidential, though. In fact, the last few mayors of Bogotá, though popular there, have a style to them (informal, intellectual, sophisticated yet down-to-earth) that’s hard to reconcile with the more traditional President.

The recent boost in Mockus’ polling numbers likely corresponds to his union with another former mayor, Sergio Fajardo. For a little while people saw Fajardo as a possible Colombian Obama, a guy who the youth could rally around, whose message might resonate as he was an ‘outsider’ rather than a well-known political figure. His administration as mayor of Medellín was widely respected, and he embarked on a slow but steady campaign around the country, in order to put himself out there and gain some notoriety outside of Medellín. Beyond that, though, he ran into problems. He was too cryptic in his positions, seemingly never coming down strongly for anything (much like Obama, funnily enough). He made an ill-fated attempt at translating his own popularity to a political movement, but lack of identification meant that people weren’t really sure who the Fajardo-approved candidates for Congress were, and they didn’t have much success. His polling numbers were low, too, and it didn’t really seem like people knew who he was. His presidential campaign was as good as dead.

Since it was clear that he wasn’t going to get anywhere, his supporters started indicating that he should ally himself with Mockus², which he’s done. This week they announced their union. Mockus will run for the presidency, and Fajardo will be his vice-president.

Even though Fajardo himself wasn’t polling well, and Mockus’ numbers were not amazing, the union has given new life to the campaign. While vice-presidential choices usually mean almost nothing in Colombia, in this case the union gives them an air of cohesion; instead of seeming like the usual Mockus run, now they appear as a genuine political project, which most of the other candidates can’t say.

There’s no indication that a Mockus presidency would be an unqualified success. One could argue that the country’s massive corruption would overwhelm him. It’s one thing to solve a city’s problems, and another to deal with an entire country where there’s all sorts of different attitudes. It’s one thing to deal with a few strong local institutions and another thing to deal with massively corrupt national ones. It’s one thing to get bogotanos to like their city and respect it, and another to get costeños to do the same. But I don’t really care though. I’d rather he try and fail than to have some dubious power-grabber or perennial bootlicker there.

With Mockus as 2nd in the polls, the elections actually have some meaning, because there might actually be repercussions beyond ‘level in which we’re fucked’. When the race was between Juan Manuel Santos and Noemí Sanin, it was reasonable to assume that a vast number of colombians, those who support the more center-left candidates, wouldn’t have cared  much for the runoff. But if it comes to a Mockus vs. Santos duel, it would be a fight between the more traditional political groups and the more independent members of society.

And there is Mockus’ main weakness: the country is still very old-fashioned politically; the same political families buy votes, the same party machines move voters under the promise of a few dollars per vote, and the idea of an opinion vote is a longshot for many. Mockus is the anti-politician in that sense; some focus was given to his plea that, if one were to vote for him, one should do so because of one’s conscience, not because of an order given by anyone else. Whoever remains from the old guard after the first vote (Santos, most likely) will have the support of many of the political machines, the big families, the networks. Mockus and Fajardo would need to mobilize a vast majority of the opinion voters, those who might be more apathetic as they have no material reward. Though the Green Party, of which Mockus is the candidate, isn’t usually strong, the results of its internal primaries, the ones that gave Mockus the nomination over Peñalosa and Garzón, were promising.

Can Mockus win over the truly ‘popular’ vote and take the presidency?

Well… maybe if I register to vote…

A long while ago I wrote a bit about a player from my hometown football team called Javier Florez, who was in jail at the time for shooting a fan to death after a post-game altercation. At the time I wrote that the event was likely his undoing.

Imagine my surprise when I picked up a newspaper a few days ago and found out that instead of being in jail, he’s paying an indemnity to the deceased’s family and playing football games.

I was waiting all afternoon, along with the rest of Colombia, to see what the Supreme Court would say about Uribe’s re-election chances. The possibility of a third term for Uribe has been looming for years, and the past few months have been uncertain in that regard, with no one really knowing whether he was going to be able to run or whether he’d have a successor, and what the fate of the country’s governing institutions was going to be. After a few false calls, the Court finally announced that the referendum to grant Uribe the chance of a third term was unexecutable, putting an end to the Uribe era.

Thank Christ.

The Court’s decision shows that there was, in fact, a limit to Uribe’s power. It’s been known for a while that the circumstances that led to Uribe being able to run for a second term included bribes for votes, which casts serious doubts on the legitimacy of the past four years of his presidency. This second referendum to allow for a third term has had all sorts of inconsistencies and internal problems, and while that could have been safely ignored at earlier stages of Uribe’s presidency, by now it would be a too obvious, too public case of corruption. The feeling across the political world – be it for noble reasons or base self-interest – was that a third term, though potentially benefitial, would cause serious damage to the country’s government institutions and resemble the situation in neighbour Venezuela too much for anyone’s comfort. Perhaps realizing that publicly advocating for a third term would be seen as dictatorial, Uribe has stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the entire sage, never really making it clear if he wanted to run or not, which would add legitimacy to his third term, seeing as he could claim he was following the people’s voice after his supporters had the referendum passed. Even if the referendum had passed, there’s a sense of fatigue in the nation regarding Uribe’s government. He still has remarkable levels of support, but eight years of scandals and some ill-conceived policies have caused people not to dislike him, but at least consider whether he is absolutely the best choice for the country’s higher office.

Being out of power after eight years will give Uribe a greater chance to go down in Colombian history as an important and respected President; I don’t doubt that another four years would have eroded his popularity and damaged Colombia’s image in the world. There’ll certainly be a lot of support for him. I know a sizable amount of Colombians truly do believe he was an absolutely wonderful president, and perhaps they shouldn’t be dismissed.

I don’t want to ignore that Uribe changed the country’s circumstances and there are aspects of his administration that should be given credit. However, I do think the idea of Uribe being a ‘good’ President was somewhat predetermined — people wanted to believe. I remember even back in 2003, when he tried his first referendum, he had considerable support from the general population, though he lost. After the dual disasters of Samper in 1994 and Pastrana in 1998, I think people were ready to believe, and Uribe’s personality and attitude were exactly what many people were receptive to.

Now the elections for presidency are in just a few months, and candidates have to start defining their campaigns, since they’d been hesitant without the knowledge of whether they were running against Uribe or not. None of the candidates have that quality (the one Americans talk about so much during their elections): electability. I’m not sure if that’s tautological, or a self-fulfilling prophecy, or whatever you want to call it. It probably is. Honestly, though, none of the candidates running seem like they could win. I’m sure part of that is simply the result of Uribe’s involvement in the election (or lack thereof) preventing anyone from making a true political campaign, but I’m not terribly convinced the winner, whoever it may be, will seem like a great idea in four years time.

I wonder what happens to Uribe now. He’s seemed like an untouchable figure for what feels like an eternity, but no one’s untouchable. Fujimori’s recent trial is strong evidence of that, and he’s got nothing on Uribe. Whether he gets in legal trouble or not, I doubt the history of his administration will end the day he steps down from office.

The year 2009 is the ‘end of the decade’, but if something defines it, it’s the fact that it’s not an ending, or a new beginning. It’s the year that shows people of my age and generation that the 00s were not some aberration. Everything that happened during the 00s, politically, was standard. It just happened more out in the open this time.

The fact is Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have turned out to be willing  to not only ignore the wants and needs of the people that voted for them, but to openly antagonize them and paint them as enemies unless they conform to whatever legislation Obama and Congress want to pass. It’s a blow to people who came of age in the Bush era and wanted to believe that, for once, they weren’t being lied to. These are the people that grew up in a culture of cynicism and irony, who wanted to lower their shields just for once, who wanted to cast a vote that wasn’t part of a ‘least possible harm’ calculation. They’ve been abused by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress that they put into power.

It’s been encouraging, though, to see that these people, who voted for Obama expecting a competent and honest leader, can see that he is anything but. There were a lot of spirited defenses for Obama during the early parts of the year, but they’ve slowly become less common as liberals and young voters realize they would just be fooling themselves. They’re justifiably outraged, but not always hopeless, or cynical, or defeated. There’s a very real possibility that the movement that grew out of support for Obama can exist without him, and maybe even against him. All good things.

American politics do seem very hopeless, but I think that more and more, people are getting the right idea, which is to simply be honest and true to values. Instead of apologizing for politicians’ calculations, or defending them because ‘they’re better than the alternative’, why not simply say ‘I don’t agree with this’, or ‘I can’t support this’ ? There is such a thing as too much of the big picture, especially when the big picture generally consists of little more than your uninformed speculation about future events.

I liked Obama during the election season and hoped he’d win. Too bad he has turned out to be less than adequate. Better to be honest about it than to enable these low standards.

People like to laugh at ‘dumb Americans and their politics’, but the truth is a vast number of Americans have caught onto these lies quickly enough, at least when compared to my home country. The political situation in Colombia, especially with regards to Venezuela, is actually really interesting in the sense that it’s about as close to a test tube experiment for cognitive dissonance as you could ever hope to be able to run in the real world. We have Alvaro Uribe, a right-leaning President who is keeping himself in power through re-election schemes, and then our neighbor country has Hugo Chavez, a left-leaning President who is keeping himself in power through re-election schemes. If you ever wanted to look at double standards, this is your chance. Colombians somehow manage to simultaneously believe that Alvaro Uribe should be re-elected, for a second time, because well, he’s just that good, and it’s his project that needs to be finished, and we need continunity, and look at all the improvements, and it’s the will of the people, and more reasons. That other guy, though? Chavez? He is making a mockery of governing, he is conning his people, he is a dangerous dictator, he is perpetually in power and damaging democracy, if people want that they should vote for a successor, etc. A similar phenomenon happens in Venezuela.

I’m not really a supporter of either, which I suppose is why I find the situation so amusing and their behavior so evidently similar. Even though the city I live in is not as pro-Uribe as many other parts of the country, it’s still strange to see so much support for a second re-election, when his presidency’s had a truly incredible number of scandals and controversies. The country’s corruption problems show no signs of improvement, and yet if Uribe can manage to be legally re-electable (through dubious means), he’ll handily win, in all likelyhood. I suppose this is what happens when there is such a large political vacuum: the first clever person to notice can fill in for as long as he or she wants.

So what is better? Voting for a guy you like that turns out to be terrible, or not really having anyone to vote for and seeing a really terrible guy remain in power? I won’t know until next year, but right now I wish I’d voted for a worthless liberal that actually won. At least that way you feel like you own the problem.

The Spanish magazine Marca published an interview this week with Javier Flórez, a player from my hometown’s footbal team, Club Atlético Junior. Junior were on the club championships final this season, but lost both games to Once Caldas in a rather sad fashion. A few days later, Flórez was harassed and called names by some locals, and he proceeded to shoot and kill one of them. He fled, but eventually turned himself in and has been on a judicial process ever since. This interview was his first serious statement after the events.

An event like this really highlights the most rotten aspects of a society, since it’s so random and absurd. What’s more distressing is that it seems to follow a loose pattern of violence in Colombian sports that’s atypical.

Elson Becerra was a striker for the Colombian national team and for Atletico Junior, Deportes Tolima, and Al Jazira. In 2006, Becerra was shot and killed at a nightclub in Cartagena, a city off the Atlantic Coast. He was 27 years old. His friend Alexander Rios also died in the attack. In 2009, the man arrested for involvement in the crime was set free due to the lack of evidence to convict.

Albeiro Usuriaga was another national team striker, from an older generation. In 1989 he won the Copa Libertadores with Atletico Nacional, at the time the highest victory for any Colombian footbal team. His career was always marked by disciplinary problems and instability. In 2004, he was murdered at a nightclub district in Cali. Reports at the time said that he had possibly witnessed a homicide, which had resulted in a hit on his life.

Andrés Escobar was one of the shining pearls of Colombian football. He was part of the team that showed promise in the run-up to the 1994 World Cup. He was a defender, solid at the back line while figures such as Carlos Valderrama and Freddy Rincón moved the midfield. Colombia qualified for the World Cup and demolished Argentina 5-0 in the process; the team was praised and many considered them serious contenders for the trophy. The Colombian World Cup dream collapsed quickly; they lost their opening game 3-1 to Romania, outclassed by Hagi’s team. Their second game, against the U.S., was make-or-break. If they won, they could have a reasonable chance of qualifying; if they lost, it was all over. Andrés Escobar scored an own goal on that match, and Colombia bowed out of the tournament prematurely. Shortly after arriving in Colombia, he was gunned down outside of a bar in Medellín, for motives that are still unclear. He was 27 years old.

I don’t want to be melodramatic or make generalizations about the country as a whole, but it’s definitely unusual that players themselves are involved in all these crimes. It’s been a problem for years and it does not seem to stop.

The three players mentioned are not the only ones; eight others lost their lives between 1993 and 2005, Becerra only adding to those. Outside of the playing field, others have met similar fates. Once Caldas won the 2004 Copa Libertadores, led by their coach Luis Fernando Montoya, who did what he could with a technically inferior team that closed up on their rivals and squeaked by on counter-attacks. A few months after the victory, Montoya was shot and paralyzed after a botched armed robbery. He survived.

I don’t think the violence is necessarily representative of a deep-rooted problem in the world of sports. Rather, it highlights the gulf between what a professional athlete is in a country like Colombia, and what he is in a country like Spain or England. The players and participants in these sports tend to be from poor backgrounds; their salaries are generally not enough to take them out of those environments and lifestyles. When asked why he was carrying a gun in the first place, Javier Flórez said that his neighborhood is dangerous. Everyone is armed there for security precautions. The players are in situations that are not out of the ordinary, but would seem to be so for people that are presumably earning enough. But it’s hard, money or no money, to move outside of your social circles completely. In the case of Flórez, it seems to have been his undoing.