Political power not only corrupts, it also mummifies. She awakens the sleeping chimpanzee in the subconscious. He strangely dissects hiding the inner rot with shiny outer appearance. It turns lucid people into barbarians, democrats into autocrats, human beings into implacable gorillas with desires for greatness and perpetuity.
Mummy, Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua. Libertarian in the opposition, autocrat in power. Mummy similar to the Somoza mummy.
Mummy, Maduro, Chávez hologram. He mummified himself crushing democracy. He pushed millions of Venezuelans onto the streets, a people who wander throughout the continent dragging their misery.
Truly, no mommy loves his people. He doesn’t love anyone, his speeches are not true. He only gets high on political power to satisfy his megalomania, his pathological self-idolatry.
Bolívar, first mummified in Colombia. Revolutionary in his liberal period, intelligent fighter against Spanish colonialism, Masonic like every liberal of the time. He mummified himself in power, he promoted centralism, he was the original image of the conservative party. He wanted to perpetuate himself according to the Bolivian Constitution. At the end of his days, he longed for a monarchy where he would possibly be the first king. Excellent paradigm of liberal mummification, ideologies are also mummified.
The liberal story was mummified: in 13 years, after the French Revolution, its first great historical mummy came to power, the implacable Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven denounced it in his angry letter to the French mummy, and Alejo Carpentier in his novel “The Century of Enlightenment,” and Goya in his “Dream of Reason Produces Monsters.”
Colombia, so slow in its historical processes, understood liberal mummification after so many internal wars, so many naive Colombians murdered for being liberal, until the National Front was signed. There was an unusual discovery, there was no difference between Pastrana, the conservative, and Turbay Ayala, the liberal. “Two cockroaches from the same pumpkin,” stated a farmer of the time.
In the United States, only cosmetic differences between moms, between Biden and Trump.
Marxism was also mummified. Lenin’s body was mummified, a disturbing metaphor for political power. Stalin remained, a terrifying mummy, as murderous as the German, Hitler. Mao Tse-tung died mummified and Xi Jinping is mummified with old liberalism. He inaugurates the era of the new mummies, those of the fourth industrial revolution.
Sad fate of political power: mummifying parishioners, alienating them, crushing any cell of humanism, only to defend human inconsequentialities and the properties of the powerful.
Political mummies, apparently alive on the outside, but dead on the inside. “You are dead – wrote the poet Vallejo – / What a strange way to be dead. Whoever would say you are not. But, in truth, you are dead.” Humanly dead.
