“On the 31st of August of a year that I shall not say, successive earthquakes will destroy Santa Fe…” Francisco Margallo
Armando Orozco Tovar
The Earth is an animal that shakes. It is a living being that has been turning since the moment of its known existence, and like any living being, parasites roam along its humanity of stone.
This spaceship is a big desperate animal. But what can she do? Jump, cry, and ask for mercy. Ask them not to fill her with so many shopping centres and university parking lots… Ask them not to cram her with more and more people, poor residents of a crazy town. The reality is that the Earth trembles unexpectedly with fatal shocks, as is reported in the news.
People arrive to the cities…
When was the last time this took place in Bogotá, Colombia? In 1967, when there were only one and a half million inhabitants.
Firstly, it was due to the migration of farmers, displaced by violence generated by the conflict between the liberal and conservative parties, which left more than three hundred thousand victims.
Then came the second wave of displaced people…Those that were pushed out by the conflagration that started in ‘64 with the attack on the areas of Tolima, Marquetalia, el Pato, Rio Chiquito, Guayabero. All of them were rural areas named “independent republics” by the leading conservative Álvaro Gómez Hurtado. They were territories that did not recognise the sovereignty of the Colombian State, and to which the Army could not enter. Since 1964, when these towns were bombed, people were forced to move to other cities… a true social earthquake which is still taking place in 2016. On the morning of that year, I was trembling beneath a door whilst the “tremor” took place.
It was a way to protect myself until the disaster passed, whose epicentre fell in the area of Huila.
It was there that the indiscriminate bombings began against the rural population, giving rise to the prolonged war of the revolutionary guerrilla group FARC-EP, which was filmed by the Frenchman Bruno Müell. Of course, there had been other movements of the Earth in the Sabana of Bogotá.
The longest was an earthquake that lasted 15 seconds with successive aftershocks, the strongest until today, though there were other serious ones between 1826 and 1927.
The priest Francisco Margallo once stated that, “On the 31st of August of a year I shall not say, successive earthquakes will destroy Santa Fe…” What is certain is that the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, under the pitiful leadership of Enrique Peñalosa, must now develop free emergency aid packages to be distributed to all the inhabitants of Bogotá so that they can deal with other earthquakes, this time of the Earth itself. Hopefully they will be handed out soon, in case Margallo’s prophecy comes true and is not just a mere joke.
Translated by Lucy Daghorn) – Photos: Pixabay
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