This was Gustavo Petro’s speech at the opening of FILBO 2024

The Colombian president emphasized one of the phrases from ‘La vorágine’ with a copy in hand: “Before I had fallen in love with any woman, I gambled my heart at random and was won by violence,” on which he based much of his speech since, in his words, “the heart of Colombia has been filled with hatred and violence.”

Nature and the destruction of the Amazon also marked his speech because “the Amazon rainforest is being depredated again, it is no longer rubber (as in ‘La vorágine’) there are other reasons, but it is ending life”, something which in turn was related to the water shortage and the drought that Bogotá is going through, which has led to rationing measures in the capital.

“It was written a century ago and we didn’t understand it, we didn’t understand the written word,” he said.

The spoken and written word

The Colombian head of state took advantage of the space to remember the creator of the Bogotá Book Fair, who he said was the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, assassinated in 1948: “paradoxically, the genius of the spoken word gave space to the written word (…) which ended shortly in the word forcibly silenced”.

“And that is the history of Colombia; a rebellious word, which gets rid of the mute, which is spoken as a rebel, which is written as a rebel and which also ends up mute by force,” added Petro, for whom “there can be no revolution without creation, which is ultimately art”.

And, like ‘La vorágine’, “works of art do not age (…) art remains,” Petro concluded.