El olvido que seremos

Héctor Abad Faciolince

4 ideas

1. Assassination of Héctor Abad Gómez, Medellín 1987

   On 25 August 1987, Héctor Abad Gómez, a physician, public-health professor and president of Antioquia's Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, was shot dead by paramilitary gunmen in Medellín. He was on his way to the wake of the murdered teachers' union leader Luis Felipe Vélez. In his pocket were a list of people marked for death that included his own name, and a handwritten copy of a sonnet attributed to Borges beginning 'Ya somos el olvido que seremos'. The case shows how Colombian paramilitaries of the 1980s killed nonviolent civic critics one by one, labeling them subversives for documenting abuses.

2. Clean water saves more than medicine

   Abad Gómez argued that a population's health depends less on doctors treating the sick than on drinking water, sewers, vaccination, nutrition and reducing poverty. For him, preventive public health was a moral and political program. That made the physician an advocate for social change, which is why elites and the armed right read his medical work as subversion.

3. Make children happy to make them good

   The father held that tenderness, praise and open physical affection form a child's character better than severity and punishment. His rule was that a happy child becomes a good adult. The son presents his own formation as evidence: he was raised with overt love and never feared his father, and he credits that upbringing with his moral compass and his capacity to love.

4. Memoir as a postponement of oblivion

   The book treats memory as a temporary shelter against a second death: a person truly disappears when the last people who remember them are gone. Writing a precise, loving record cannot defeat oblivion, but it can delay it and pass the memory to strangers. The title's line, 'we are already the oblivion we will be', frames the whole portrait as a knowing and finite act of resistance.

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