Walls that are not seen

Walls that are not

Ignacio Ortega

Writer



If there is something about the world is to walls and borders. Physical walls that separate us, but also ideological, economic, political and legal, although they may sometimes spend more unnoticed, also hurt, and fall away.

The Berlin Wall collapse which twenty years ago we have seen repeatedly from morning to night, we read and heard various names such as the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Shame, the Iron Curtain, it will not. However, those walls that conveys the story takes us to other places where there may be other walls. Each wall is born brings us into the past. And above all, into places and times that do not exist, but we know can be very close, there are people, governments and states that may arise. There are other walls that have no physical impassable walls, but which do not seek out anyone. Or that no man, or anyone who does not speak, or all forgotten.

Environmental reasons, for example, is the official excuse that the Government of Rio de Janeiro has explained to the public to surround the Morro Dona Marta favela with a wall of three meters of pain. As painful as the green line of the West Bank consists of trenches, barbed wire fences and concrete slabs can eight feet high. It is true that if we compare in height perhaps the pain barrier Melilla outstrip him, or if the pain was tangible, perhaps the Moroccan wall that divides the Saharawi territory along 2,500 km more painful than the slums of Governor Sergio Cabral. But the levers of power have no measure for pain.

There walls are not walls to see but after all that, but sometimes can go unnoticed, separated by prejudice and fear, anguish and uncertainty of life borrowed and marginalization, exclusion or disappointment. Walls kill the dream of its inhabitants, walls that condemn their own territory that you can cross. Not even think about cross yours.

One of the most violent stresses of my life Tertullian had with a radio a year ago that he considered wasteful Andalusian government actions in certain areas of Almería. Another, with a friend who had heard from another mutual friend of local politics that El Puche, La Chanca or Round Stones were well behind its walls. I swore on my honor that could not be. Things said, I said, as removing iron. My friend could not believe what was said by mutual friend. Finally got to calm down and, after insisting a lot, I convinced him it was only a nightmare ear, but not before the walls suggest that there are better kept prudently away.