Bogotá.- Outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced this Monday that he will return the sword of the Liberator Simón Bolívar to the Quinta de Bolívar House Museum, and will hand over the cassock of the priest and guerrilla fighter Camilo Torres Restrepo to the National Museum, as part of the symbolic acts with which he bids farewell to the Presidency.
During his last public speech to the citizenry as head of state in the populous sector of Ciudad Bolívar, in southern Bogotá, Petro stated that the Liberator’s sword “cannot be sheathed until there is justice in Colombia” and maintained that it will be the people who guard it because “they will not let it be sheathed until they are capable of building justice.”
The sword was one of the symbols of Petro’s Government since his inauguration in the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, an object that he also displayed during his May Day speech last year and which remains on display at the Casa de Nariño, the presidential headquarters.
Petro and Bolivar’s sword
The president also vindicated the figure of Camilo Torres Restrepo, a priest, sociologist, and precursor of Liberation Theology who left the priesthood to join the National Liberation Army (ELN) in 1965 and died in combat the following year.
An admirer of his political and social legacy, Petro has turned his figure into one of the symbols of his Government and a few years ago said that he had in his possession the cassock of the so-called “guerrilla priest,” which, like the sword, he will take out of the Casa de Nariño upon the arrival to power, on August 7, of his successor, the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella.
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The president lamented that “in Colombia they censor the voice of those who bring rebellion to the people” and announced that the cassock that the clergyman left behind before joining that organization will be delivered to the National Museum and will remain under the care of the Faculty of Heritage of the National University.
