The Legacy of Antanas Mockus’s Charisma

Mayor Antanas Mockus during the ‘carrot laws’ in Bogotá, Colombia, 1997. Personal archive of Antanas Mockus

My Personal Hero

It was two in the morning on a night in late May, or maybe June, and I was on a balcony overlooking the main pedestrian street, Laisvės Alėja, in the city of Kaunas. I was an Erasmus student, and a party at my house was in full swing. I remember the door opening and a stranger stepping out onto the balcony. It was a Colombian girl who had come to Lithuania from South America because she wanted to find out about the origins of a man who had changed her life. From that night on, Antanas Mockus would change my destiny too.

Kaunas, Lithuania, 2007

Imagine you’re a communications student at a university specialising in sociology. After all, in this world, everything is communication and everything is sociology. However, you’re not entirely clear about what direction to take until a stranger tells you about the dean of a university who stirred up a national scandal by lowering his pants to display his bare bottom to an audience of two thousand stunned students. Imagine that after this scandal, this guy, forced to resign from his country’s most important cultural institution, starts walking the streets dressed as a superhero to show his fellow citizens that the impossible can become possible if everyone does their part, and he is then elect­ed the mayor of a metropolis with a population of eight million people. This is the story of Antanas Mockus. In Colombia, it was the story of an entire generation. My own generation.

When I returned to my hometown of Genoa, in Italy, I discussed Antanas Mockus with my thesis advisor, Professor Augusta M., who had closely studied the various avant-garde political and social movements of the late twentieth century during her academic career. She could hardly believe her ears, as Antanas Mockus seemed the perfect embodiment of the most significant insights of the post-Marxist sociologists, who saw cultural and symbolic factors as being potentially crucial for subverting relationships of power and domination within societies.

Seven months later, in February 2008, I boarded a plane to Colombia. I was not yet twenty-two years old, and I really didn’t have the faintest idea of what Latin America was all about. I only knew, or rather felt, that this was where the most fertile, delirious and un­restrained experiments in shaping a possible future had emerged in recent decades. However, I also knew that many of these utopian visions had foundered upon the violent contradictions that pervade South America. In pursuing a crazy professor, I was destined to discover my own personal El Dorado.

Sketch from Antanas Mockus’s personal office

Antanas Mockus in the 1970s. Personal archive of Antanas Mockus

El Lituano

In Colombia, Antanas Mockus was simply known as El Lituano (the Lithuanian). His mother Nijolė Šivickas, an artist, and his father Alfonsas Mockus, an engineer, came to Colombia on 9 April 1948, fleeing a homeland that was doomed to undergo half a century of Soviet domination. However, shortly after their arrival, a period of political violence began in Bogotá that would last for over 50 years and that would finally relent partly thanks, to some degree at least, to their son Antanas.

As I climbed into a taxi on my way to the fateful meeting with him, I realised that the intuition that had led me there was not unfounded. ‘If you’re a friend of the Professor, you won’t have to pay for this ride,’ said the taxi driver. ‘Mayor Mockus has taught us to be better citizens.’ Many other Colombians, from all walks of life, shared the taxi driver’s opinion, and over the years, it became clear to me that for them Antanas represented something between Gandhi and Bono: an idealistic figure with a political and social impact, but also a sort of pop star. Elected Mayor of Bogotá on 1 January 1995 (becoming the city’s very first mayor to be independent and unaffiliated with a political party), Mockus took over the leadership of what was widely considered to be the most dangerous city in the world, plagued by the violence associated with drug trafficking. His first act as mayor was to abolish the corrupt municipal police force, which was replaced with an army of mimes, clowns and street perform­ers. Mockus had understood that the typical macho Colombian saw himself as a dominant ‘alpha male’: a swaggering king of the urban jungle. To change this behaviour, he believed it was necessary to humble offenders and to wound their pride, and so the street performers were hired to act out the negative consequences that violations of the law could have within the city’s ecosystem.

In fact, the principle of self-regulation has always been cen­tral to Antanas’s approach, ever since he was a young professor at the Universidad Nacional, where he once locked himself up for a week, in a prison cell in the middle of the campus, claiming that ‘someday only self-imposed jail will exist’ and that in a dis­tant future, humans will perhaps learn to regulate their behav­iour without the need for an external policing system. But during his tenure as mayor, a ‘voluntary curfew for men’ was necessary to make the streets safer in Bogotá. Thus, on one night each month, the men of Bogotá were allowed to walk the streets only if in possession of a ‘safe conduct’ signed by at least two women. For perhaps the first time in history, male urban behaviour was regulated by women. The repercussions were immense: after a drop in violent crime of nearly 70%, Colombian society as a whole began a profound reflection on its dysfunctional aspects, setting in motion a process that would eventually lead to a nationwide campaign of voluntary disarmament.

The Good Loser

After making these revelations to Professor Augusta M., I pointed out that the potential lines of inquiry of my university thesis were practically infinite. It seemed that the political-artistic activity of Antanas Mockus had successfully embodied – albeit three decades later and in another part of the world – the concept of ‘Imagination in Power’, perhaps the most profound message of the French student uprising in May 1968. An un­derground thread, invisible but concrete, had kept the aims and possibilities of this movement alive, in the hope that good seeds can remain dormant for a long time, until the right conditions arise for them to germinate.

Mimes involved in the regulation of traffic problems, Bogotá. June 1997. Photo: Eduardo Sotomayor

In 2012, my thesis was published in Italy under the title Un sindaco fuori del comune (An Extraordinary Mayor), and when Antanas came to Italy for a tour to promote the book, my super­hero stood beside me, in the flesh. During that trip, we remi­nisced about the amazing events of spring 2010 when, after eight years of Álvaro Uribe’s controversial presidency, Colombians were about to return to the polls. Given the outgoing president’s high popularity ratings, everything suggested that his heir appar­ent, the Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos, would be elected. However, a new instrument for political action had just emerged: Facebook. Social networks have undoubtedly had an impact all over the world, but their impact is particularly strong in young and vibrant societies, in which an entire generation, hitherto excluded from political considerations, has been able to mobilise massive support and consensus for the first time.

In this case, the effect was overwhelming. In early March 2010, 90 days before the elections, Mockus was seen as a rather quirky marginal candidate, but just a few weeks later, in April, he could boast the world’s second-most popular Facebook page for a politician, after Barack Obama. Faced with this unexpected threat, Santos, the establishment candidate, had to take action. He hired the best ‘shit-storming’ spin-doctors and, shortly before the elections, the Colombian newspapers printed a sensational scoop: Antanas Mockus had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The outgoing President Uribe declared that ‘Colombians will know how to choose between a healthy and a sick horse’. On 30 May 2010, Antanas Mockus won the first round vote, only to be defeated in the final runoff election a few weeks later.

Antanas Mockus and his mother, Nijolė Šivickas, in her house-atelier, Bogotá. Still from the film Nijolė, 2018

But more plot twists and unexpected events were in store. The elections had made it clear that an entire generation of Colombians had rallied around Mockus because they were tired of the 50-year civil war between the government and the FARC rebel organisation. After being elected by the right-wing voters, Juan Manuel Santos therefore made the extraordinary decla­ration that his government would be inspired by the powerful message behind Antanas Mockus’s candidacy. Thus, in 2016, a historic peace agreement was signed between the government and the FARC, and Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bloody Ties

Meanwhile, my involvement in Antanas’s life almost seemed to be getting out of hand. One wet and rainy afternoon, Antanas took me to meet his mother, Nijolė, at her home-studio in Bogotá. I came to understand how the deep roots of his story reached back in time and space to the complex events of the 1930s, which had profoundly affected Lithuania and that still constituted an unresolved trauma. Over the next five years, I would spend many months in the company of this extraor­dinary woman, thanks to whom I was able to appreciate that Antanas had a two-fold aspect. His mother, an uncompromis­ing and absolute artist, never shrank from what she saw as the sacredness of artistic action, the only true means of salvation for humanity. Remaining at her side over the decades, day after day, Antanas absorbed the living substance of his mother’s ideas, transforming and transporting them into an ethereal, invisible, non-material, and yet collective dimension. Antanas Mockus was able to express his own artistic identity at the 2012 Berlin Biennale, through the performative installation Bloody Ties, which asked visitors to pledge to stop using drugs or to reduce their consumption for at least six months. This commitment, involving a contract with oneself, was intended to highlight the role of European consumers in the tragedy of drug trafficking in South America.

At the end of this incredible journey, Antanas now lives a secluded life in his native Bogotá, and a whole new generation is completely unaware of what happened in Bogotá at the turn of the century. So what is the legacy of Antanas Mockus in Colombia? Box office statistics indicate that the superhero genre is no longer so popular, having been supplanted by stories (that reflect the reality of our present situation) in which human beings have surrendered to the power of androids and algo­rithmic intelligence. And yet, hidden away in the archives of Colombian collective memory, the story of a man who wanted to change the world through the power of setting a good example lies dormant, suspended in time. Antanas Mockus still wears the heroic mantle of the last of the humanists, and perhaps he is actually the pioneer of a new kind of human being, one that is already in the making.