I don’t know if anyone of you heard about the last presidential elections in Colombia. However, I believe what happened last June in Colombia was a clear example of how ethos play an important role in the invention and consequently the achievement of the goal of a speech or in this case a whole presidential campaign.
This year the two strongest opponents running for president in Colombia came from very different backgrounds. The first one, Antanas Mockus, was an academic. Mockus was born in a middle class Lithuanian immigrant family. He has a BA in Mathematics and a PhD in Philosophy. He was president of the National University of Colombia, mayor of Bogota, the capital and part of the committee of wise men chosen to dialogue with the guerrillas. Mockus arrived into the politics through his interest in education and, in my opinion, his sincere intention to make changes that benefit the most disadvantaged sectors of society. The second one, Juan Manuel Santos, was born into one of the most powerful families in Colombia, the owners of the most important and almost only newspaper of the nation, El Tiempo. He also has a strong academic training and as many would say has an impeccable CV. How I see it, he has invested his whole life preparing to be president and his academic training is another example of it. Additionally, he has been part of the Cabinet of the last three presidents as Minister of Foreign Trade, of Finance and National Defense. This is an example of how he plays his cards in perfect kayros to be able to be in the government of three presidents that came from different political wings.
All in all, both of them were very well prepared. Santos proposal was the continuity with the previous president Uribe and Mockus represented the change. Although, only this big difference could have accounted for the results at the polls, I think that the presidential debates had a lot to do with it. Unfortunately, Mockus’ ethos was not in his favor. On the one hand, he had proved to many colombians, through his term as mayor of Bogota, that he was honest and far from corruption. On the other, his private and public life was tinted with eccentricities that I think hurt his ethos and thus his campaign. Among Mockus’ eccentricities we can mention that in a university meeting with undisciplined and noisy students at the National University of Colombia what he did to calm them down was to pull down his pants and show them his bare buttocks. Some of his ideas as Bogota’s mayor also were criticized. His main purpose was to build citizenship in a city characterized by civic chaos. He hired mimes to mock citizens that were breaking civic rules such as jaywalking or driving recklessly. He also wore a Superman costume and called himself Supercitizen. Many people said that he was just a clown and couldn’t be ever president of Colombia.
Santos had his weaknesses as well. And Santos in contrast with Mockus had a history of dishonesty and corruption. Under his command as National Defense Minister in Uribe’s government, one of the most shameless scandals in Colombia took place. In the government’s war against the guerrillas, the lower ranks of the army were instructed to kidnap young men, kill them and make them appear as members of the guerrillas killed by the army. Santos always sustained he didn’t know about it and never assume any responsibility.
Santos unlike Mockus has a lot of experience being a politician and is well trained in using the political machinery needed to win a campaign election. Mockus, on the other is a good man with good intentions.
Although, one could have thought that Mockus’ ethos, his academic training, his previous experience as Bogota’s mayor, his proposal to change, his innovative and effective ideas would have helped him, they did not. Colombian citizens were scared about the big change. They didn’t want to take the risk to have a groundbreaking president with “crazy” ideas. They chose in stead a corrupt president part of the traditional political machinery that has lead Colombia for the past 100 years.
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