Problems with and without solution

The rhetoric is always the same: enemy aggression is labeled a terrorist attack, while the aggression itself is considered a legitimate exercise of defense. In this dynamic of action and reaction, it's not always possible to stop an escalation of violence that could lead to an apocalypse. It seems that, after the serious border tensions of recent weeks, India and Pakistan would now agree to a ceasefire, but that doesn't change things: the intermittent war the two countries have waged for eight decades will never lack new grievances to fuel its desire to perpetuate itself.

It all began (let's remember) when India gained independence from the British Empire in 1947 and (against the advice of Gandhi, among others) the territory was divided along religious lines. Muslims went to Pakistan, Hindus to India: the number of displaced citizens at that time, fifteen million, remains the highest in history.

From those dusts, these muds. I was told that, in one of the numerous clashes that have taken place over these nearly eighty years, Pakistani soldiers captured by the Indian army were forced to eat pork, while Indian soldiers who fell into the hands of the Pakistanis were forced to eat beef, the sacred animal for Hindus. This type of torment, so refined yet so primitive, only certifies that we are facing a religious war: a war from the time of the Crusades but with the weapons of mass destruction of Star Wars, because both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons! The dawn of humanity going hand in hand with one of the most plausible hypotheses for the end of the world!

Israel is another of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons, and although the beginning of the Palestinian conflict is also usually dated around the year of the creation of the State of Israel, very close to the decolonization of India, its territorial conflict has its origins in ancient, even biblical times. If we ever thought that, with formulas like peace for territory, this endless war could lead to a lasting peace, reality has repeatedly proven us wrong.

Colombians who defended the guerrilla now see it as an anachronistic phenomenon.

Was this what Hamas was seeking when it launched its October 2023 terrorist attack, which was inevitably followed by an Israeli response that can only be described as genocide? Could it be that Hamas's leaders didn't sense that the subsequent "I'll shoot because it's my turn" in that bloody Parcheesi game would provoke a massive escalation of destruction and pain? All the painstaking steps taken in pursuit of peace in that charred corner of the planet are now worthless: the long-standing Palestinian-Israeli conflict has reset its clock to zero.

History teaches us that there are problems without solutions. But sometimes, seemingly insoluble problems are on the way to being resolved forever. I am writing these lines in a hotel room in Bogotá. Colombian society, heavily militarized, has been enduring a civil war of varying intensity for six decades. Even now, without support from any sector of society and dragged by an inertia not unrelated to the dark power structure of drug trafficking, guerrilla groups operate throughout much of the country.

Read also Bomb Literature Ignacio Martínez de Pison

Of all of Latin America, Colombia is the country I've visited the most. The first time I was in Bogotá, in the late 1990s, the guerrillas had taken up positions around the capital, and the people of Bogotá were anxious about the possibility of their city becoming a battlefield. On my subsequent visits, that anxiety had been replaced by other, more commonplace ones, and Colombians who once defended the guerrillas' actions now view them as an anachronistic, inefficient, and disconnected phenomenon.

If, in a country with as much potential as Colombia, wealth were more evenly distributed and taxes on the upper classes were allocated to combat social inequalities, the guerrilla problem would indeed be one of the few that would have found a definitive solution.