A very dear friend sends me a photo of her group, enjoying sitting somewhere near the sea, with the sun and bushes for company. All smiles. The photo shook me. It looks like a photo from another world, and yet it was recent. Where is it, I ask? It doesn’t seem right to me. Like those idyllic pictures of ethereal and fictional religious worlds.

Then someone jokes telling Grandma she should go out that way and an elderly woman is seen moving around in a cage with iron bars and wheels on the corners, like a modern walker.

And I see myself sitting in a room overlooking the coast of Salado, where I enjoy watching the growth of mangroves. Before they only reached the middle of the window, now they have already exceeded it and appear in different shades of green. Newborn greens, fragile, transparent, greens with adult leaves, brown green, dark green almost black. And some other yellow leaf.

acts of hope

Why don’t they react?

I love watching them. I don’t know why the unknown law, the branches move as if they were dancing, some towards the water and some towards Barcelona Avenue swaying one to the right, the other to the left, as if a sea of ​​leaves in rhythmic movements of opposites. I observe the tender green leaves of the black olive trees on the sidewalk and the same rhythmic, subtle, joyful movement shakes their branches. I don’t know why the birds don’t nest in its branches while the mangrove bustle, at times deafening, flickers in the middle of the afternoon. And I become aware of something that I almost ignored because it was obvious. I see all this through the bars, the ones on the window, and the thick bars that separate me from Avenida Barcelona, ​​that fleeing criminals jump better than Olympic athletes. The whole neighborhood has bars, electric wires and a guard of the block that we all pay, a park with bars, shops with bars, a pharmacy with bars and now a church with bars. And it seems to us to have them in advance, we claim that it is so. In the nearby sector, there are fences for exiting the streets, sirens, social points. And a new conquest are taxi drivers in vehicles with internal grilles.

The whole neighborhood has bars, electrified wires and a block watchman that we all pay for…

In popular sectors, they appear everywhere. It seems that only the grand avenues will be able to circulate freely.

Guillermo Lasso: Criminal groups do not have drugs to trade and their criminal capacity is mutated towards other crimes

And internal conflicts in the neighborhood multiply because of its use, and dissatisfactions, fights, and conflicts arise that eventually break friendships and neighborhoods. The real power belongs to the one who has the key that opens and closes the obstacles.

We live in a large prison where only criminals are free, and the rest of us are locked up in prisons that are more or less gloomy or somewhat pleasant.

Not to mention penitentiaries and detention centers with their small, tall barred windows with heads, arms and screaming faces sticking out.

What has happened to us as a society that we have allowed our most frequented and most loved everyday places to turn into prisons, and armed gangs roam free? It’s time to conquer the spaces of freedom, where bars serve to admire the skill of the craftsmen who made them and from their arabesques hang pots of flowers to restore the city and the country we love. (OR)