I am writing these lines without knowing who they are yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that there are two of you, not one… let’s go to the elections on October 15.

Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher, coined a concept that haunts me these days of the campaign, and specifically since August 9, the date of Fernando Villavicenci’s death: “the banality of evil.” Arendt, of Jewish origin, and in the context of the Holocaust and especially the Nuremberg trials, argued that some individuals commit crimes without thinking about their actions when they are immersed in a system that normalizes these crimes.

We don’t know who the perpetrators of the crime are. What we do know is that Villavicencio was most violently denied the opportunity to be one of you, and thus continue to apply for the position you two will soon occupy. The brain premeditated it, planned it, used the phone and engaged whoever ended up pulling the trigger three times. This leads me to the conclusion that evil is trivialized in Ecuador. The killer behaved “like an ordinary executor, like a banal marionette, only driven by the desire to do what should be done, what was agreed upon.” He had no sense of good or evil in his actions”, according to Arendt. The killer, surely, had no feelings of hatred or revenge like the one who used a phone instead of a murder weapon. The killer must have crossed himself and asked the sky for a target, so the deal was done. The banality of evil

Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust”, the Nazi who caused and allowed the suffering and death of millions of Jews, and on whom Arendt based her story to write Eichmann in Jerusalem, felt neither guilty nor responsible for the horror he committed. Eichmann was considered innocent and declared himself so. He was doing his job. The banality of evil

After the shooting in Durán a few days ago, near a political rally, people denied that it was an attack on a candidate who was closing his campaign in that canton because shootings in Durán are common. every day. Some used the word “routine”. The banality of evil

Since we went to the polls last time to choose the position you are fighting for today, the country has changed drastically. Today, drugs seem to mark the compass of the country. A drug that we do not produce, but which crosses our borders and we diligently distribute and export it. A drug that could be the third largest non-oil/mining export after shrimp and bananas. The drug that made us a brutally violent country. A drug that extorts and kidnaps. A drug that trivialized evil.

These 18 months must be a bridge to peace. You will be faced with difficult decisions and you could become a cog in this evil system… or destroy it.

For the love of the tricolor that unites us, please, gentlemen candidates for the presidency, restore peace to us so that we no longer have to restore meaning to evil. And bury him along with his thousands of victims. (OR)