It was noon on Sunday. The beginning of the week for some or the weekend for others. The car chaos in Quito surpassed the usual, because the reason was really unusual, taken from the best horror movies. The police officers began to divert the vehicles to any part without any explanation. My son asked me dad what happened. I didn’t have a convincing answer, I just continued in that direction with the deafening noise of the whistles and the uncertainty of when we would get home. A message on Twitter told us what was happening in seconds. A few minutes ago there was an announcement about a possible bomb in the shopping center. So the Colombia I read about in novels in the 90s has now become a reality for Ecuador.

I would have never imagined that the chaos in the vehicles was due to the risk of everything and everyone exploding within seconds. I felt that it was part of the macabre scene, that the Ecuador of peace remained an anecdote for those of us who could live it, enjoy it, and partly not appreciate it, because peace is not the absence of conflict or war, but the building of everyday peaceful coexistence, in which we all put our best foot forward from everyone to the service of society. However, the bomb threat brought me into reality: it is a pressure cooker that can explode at any moment with the announcement that we have lost everything by remaining in nonsense, trifles, trifles, sterile arguments, rumours, hatred, a canteen of lawsuits.

This scenario predicts that crime and its terrifying expressions of violence can take everything, unless we reach a national agreement with one single motivation: to fight insecurity in all its forms as a commitment to everyday life. We no longer want to tolerate the shows of the Assembly, the corrupt judiciary, the incompetence of control institutions, the inefficiency of social management, the helplessness of the police and the armed forces in front of corrupt judges. It is urgent that we give ourselves a chance as a country. The national agreement must guarantee a country of peace for current and future generations, and therefore dialogue as an unavoidable mechanism for solving problems.

The national agreement is the possibility to reinvent ourselves, to grow as a society, to kill the spirit of each man for himself…

After two hours, we arrived home with our son not knowing whether it was a bomb or not, but no one removed our anxiety and the risk we are exposed to by not talking to each other, building bridges and not recognizing each other in solutions. An ethical reserve is stored in civil society to promote a long-term agreement together with academia, professional associations, civil society organizations, trade unions, business people, journalists, intellectuals, artists and political leaders who want to distinguish themselves from their bad counterparts.

The national agreement is a chance to reinvent ourselves, to grow as a society, to kill the spirit of each man for himself, because the more fragmented and individualized we are, the weaker we are. It’s now, tomorrow is late. (OR)