Gynna Brightside

They descended from the northern slopes of Medellin, the inhabitants of the communes, to represent their neighbours, autonomously and without intermediaries, to tell their story and to propose priority actions in their social environment. Dark and cheerful faces, with simple and transparent gestures like the town that gave birth to them, mixed with the informality and the protocol of the businessmen and the high official employees who looked forward to the development of such an exceptional event. From the high spheres of the national government and the departmental and municipal administrations, the agents of the public power, conscious, convinced of the need to rebuild the channels and bonds with an urban civil society that stopped from being an unshaped and gelatinous mass to return to the privilege of participation, pluralism and social democracy. They left their guarded enclosures and their offices.  The representatives of the business associations, the managers of the big factories and the presidents of the economic conglomerates and the associations of professionals left the supervised premises and their private offices to share the same space, the same discussion table, the same concerns and uncertainties with the representatives of the common, with those anonymous and indeterminate beings whom they only knew under the statistical dimension in the form of indices, rates, and percentages.  There were representatives of the mainstream media who, accustomed to war journalism and reporting on bombings and assassinations, had to be perplexed in the face of an event that oozed life and put into question the hackneyed theses of a culture of violence.  The commanders of the army and the police also attended, attentive and open to listening to the criticisms and denunciations of a tormented city, a city that in recent years has lived under the aegis of terrorism and public disorder with all that this implies a loss of prestige for the security forces, but with the conviction that it was necessary to hear the civilians and participate with them in the construction of the legitimacy of the State

Actualmente vivimos en ciudades sin ciudadanos, porque a los pobres les hemos quitado sus derechos y tenemos ciudadanos sin ciudades, porque los ricos se encierran tras las rejas, tras las barreras de sus condominios para alejarse de la ciudad