2
O
viedo
| C
ampoamor
T
heatre
| 8
th
O
ctober
1983
Belisario Betancur was President of
the Republic of Colombia from 1982
to 1986.
—
Excerpt from the speech given on the
occasion of receiving the Prince of
Asturias Award for Ibero-American
Cooperation on 8/10/1983.
Daily peace, as essential as daily bread, is the result of justice. Sometimes it seems as if we are only
joined together by the subversive common denominator of being unfair with each other, under
the cover of archaic institutions with unequal opportunities in order to continue being unequal,
in which the ruling classes dominate but do not represent, knowing that democracy lives due to
participation and dies due to imposition and poverty.
For that reason, destroying poverty must be humanity’s only war. To change the armour of
soldiers for a fertile willingness towards dialogue that becomes a beacon in this new dwelling place
of man, that is the image of our dream. In that we shall leave our mark, defeating the obstacles of
the saga of the Buendías in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by our Nobel Laureate García Márquez,
when he says that “Aureliano spent his days making little gold fish during the day, only to melt
them down at night.”
Similarly, contemporary man spends his time building schemes that the dementia of power
undoes. On the other shore, being fair is becoming increasingly more difficult; we are full of ideas
and intentions for peace, but short on actions, on a continent for which the pariah president Marco
Fidel Suárez said that “the fate of humanity is to make progress suffering”.
Is man tied to the mast of his instinct, condemned to fight tooth and nail, cruisers and missiles?
Just and unjust alike, are we destined to walk the earth breathlessly hacking our way through the
blind foliage of ideologisms?
Belisario Betancur
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Ibero-American
Cooperation 1983
Laureates. Excerpts
