There are people who accumulate lives while others barely complete one. Ángel Beccassino—writer, journalist, photographer, musician, political consultant—is one of them. He was born in San Antonio Oeste, Río Negro, in 1948, studied philosophy and economics without graduating, and from a young age knew that he wanted to see what lay beyond the next bend in the road. He lived in India, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Ecuador. He first came to Colombia in the seventies while working as creative director for Braniff, and ended up staying. Bogotá has been his home since 1986.
During that time, he built a career that is difficult to categorize: he was the creator of the slogan “Bogotá, 2,600 meters closer to the stars,” an advisor to the city’s first left-wing mayoral administration, a strategist for Chávez’s referendum in Venezuela and for the MAS in Bolivia, and in 2022, he was the mastermind behind Rodolfo Hernández, the candidate who made it to the runoff against Gustavo Petro with 10% of the winner’s budget and lost by 700 votes.
With some thirty published books to his credit, what sets him apart is not just his resume but his perspective: he speaks of politics as someone who has experienced it from the inside without losing the critical distance needed to view it from the outside.
By Lucas Malaspina
From Countercultural Journalism to Colombian Politics
Did you come to Colombia for work?
I left Argentina in ’74 and settled here in ’86.
Are you from Patagonia?
I’m from San Antonio Oeste, in Río Negro.
How did you see yourself, and what paths did you imagine when you were in high school?
I was always drawn to the next bend in the road. I wanted to see what lay beyond what I could see. Because of the decisions I made, I lived in many places: India, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Ecuador. The settings kept changing.
Were you close to the Third Position? How did you get involved in politics?
That was between ’70 and ’73. I published a little rag called Tercera, which upheld the Third Position. At that time, the situation in Algeria—the emergence of Algeria—was crucial, and it had a lot to do with the Palestinian cause. And I wrote for a magazine run by Miguel Greenberg called Contracultura. The Third Position was a mix of things: on the one hand, the idea of a Latin American Argentina, integrated into Latin America rather than looking to Paris. And on the other, the anti-establishment stance—the opposite of the formality imposed on you by the system. It was a different time, a different pace: everything was done by mail, and international calls were incredibly expensive. We moved differently across the territory, but in our minds we were racing at a thousand miles an hour, with that feeling of helplessness that comes from not being able to convey what’s in your head as quickly as you’d like.
Today, the attention economy makes it harder. It wasn’t like that back then.
Today, the big battle is for attention. Back then, the opportunities to capture and hold it were much more plentiful. Today, it’s a knife fight to the death. Trying to get a sliver of attention is extremely difficult, and holding that attention is harder still.
Movements, campaigns, and the connection between on-the-ground organization and the digital sphere
You’ve worked with organizations seeking social change, unions, and movements. How did that journey come together in Colombia?
In the ’80s, along with another friend, we founded the Movimiento Sísmico, which had a program we called collective mental hygiene. It led to many connections and also attempts at infiltration. This was in ’87. Among those connections was a very strong one with the M-19, which at that time was still a clandestine organization. That relationship then continued into the M-19’s peace negotiations with the Colombian government. I was very close to Carlos Pizarro, who was the commander-in-chief.
From there, I moved on to other political campaigns. Something very surprising happened in my work in communications: the redefinition of what Bogotá was. The city had always been seen as a kind of punishment—2,600 meters above sea level, with a páramo climate. I reframed it and described it as 2,600 meters closer to the stars. That opened up a space for attention. It also led to Lucho Garzón’s presidential campaign for the Polo Democrático, and from there, shortly afterward, we secured Bogotá’s first left-wing mayoral administration: “Bogotá sin indiferencia,” which was like redefining what solidarity meant—a word that didn’t quite resonate with people’s understanding.
That’s how things unfolded one after another until we reached 2022 with Rodolfo. In the first round, people voted for two options for change against the political party system and the powerful interests that have controlled Colombia for over 200 years. The right wing said it didn’t want Petro to win because of his past with the M-19. And that distorted a lot of things.
In addition to Colombia, I worked very closely with the MAS in Bolivia. In Venezuela, when they held the recall referendum against Chávez, I supported him on strategy at the Ministry of Communications. And I’m involved with movements and NGOs focused on wealth distribution, narrowing gaps, and balancing the country socially and territorially. Colombia has a unique feature: its three mountain ranges, which fragment the country and create territories that exist outside the reality of the state.
Rodolfo’s campaign was impressive. How did you come on board?
I took over the campaign from two Argentine friends who were leading Rodolfo’s strategy: Hugo Vázquez and Guillermo Meque. At one point, they received threats. Colombia has its security vulnerabilities, so they decided to step down. Within the approach they were working on, there were some strategies that differed somewhat from what I felt were Rodolfo’s greatest potential strengths. I made greater use of social media, aiming for it to serve as an attention-grabber and spark curiosity that would lead people to look elsewhere to find out who Rodolfo was. These days, for example, Google is gradually losing its status as the go-to search engine, with TikTok taking its place. So you combine channels, media, and stories within that same fragility of attention.
Electoral politics has a lot of spectacle in it—it always has. But in recent times, with the acceleration of content designed to capture people’s fleeting attention, it has taken a more capricious turn. What happened with Xavier Hervas in Ecuador is an example of how spectacle itself has begun to behave a little more capriciously.
How did the on-the-ground efforts work alongside the digital ones?
What happened was that we used WhatsApp through Wappid, a platform we used to expand activist participation. The model comes from Obama’s 2008 campaign: moving away from a top-down approach and fostering a bottom-up one, so that people take ownership of the campaign, feel like they’re part of it, and generate their own communication.
Rodolfo didn’t want to throw money away or rely on favors. So we ran the campaign with 10% of what Petro spent in terms of investment, because we posted the campaign materials online and people downloaded them, printed them, and shared them. That created a sense of being part of the discourse. The language had a number of characteristics that resonated with people’s feelings: calling corrupt people outright thieves, that sort of thing.
The connection between the street, on-the-ground organization, and the digital sphere was something that started to work and expanded. WhatsApp was key to spreading it, and a form of popular expression emerged: people took to the streets to honk their horns, promoting Rodolfo’s candidacy across the country.
A lot happened in the runoff election. Rodolfo let his guard down. He received threats and felt the impact. Gustavo was thrown off balance by Rodolfo’s advancement to the runoff, and Petro’s campaign became very aggressive. The final margin was 700 votes. Had the timing been just a little different, the result would have been different.
My daughter and I published a book about this: Ganar es una decisión. When the leader—or whoever is at the forefront of the enthusiasm—lets their guard down, they weaken that momentum, and their followers weaken it as well. Winning is a decision; it’s a conviction; it’s giving it your all. In Rodolfo’s case, that final push was missing.
Apathy, superficiality, and the dead end of progressivism
How do you view the epochal social and political shift in Latin America?
Understanding the region’s political moment connects you directly to capitalism, to a host of issues that are much broader than the initial, somewhat emotional interpretation. Secondly, something else is happening: the desperation that exists, which translates into apathy and, at times, into major outbursts. This dead end causes people—tired of having pinned their hopes on certain individuals—to suddenly feel that there are no solutions, no answers, nothing at all.
And people have long since forgotten the importance of questions, which are what lead you to think and reflect. For about 50 years now—since the powerful intellectual explosion of the ’60s and ’70s—superficiality has been encouraged. And amid that encouragement, the connection to the possibility of reflecting on what you’re experiencing was gradually lost. Then this accelerated violently with consumerism. Everything is consumed very quickly, thrown away very quickly—things are shat out without even being metabolized.
And amid this major shift in circumstances, new developments emerge. It’s as if the world were a world of giraffes and suddenly an elephant appeared. People don’t see what the elephant signifies; they don’t see what lies behind it; they don’t see what the elephant’s body is concealing—and they get caught up in it and surrender without knowing what they’re giving up with their choice. But behind all this, who is pulling the strings? A system that has shifted from one where you could at least know who was behind a company to investment funds where you don’t know who these figures are or what lies beyond the manipulation they engage in.
When you look at how those investment funds operate and how wars are waged today, you find the same scenario. It’s striking that a person can operate, from home, a missile that destroys 50,000 lives, go to work at the office, and then come back for dinner. That distance from the horror is significant. We’re talking about very specific situations that are actually happening.
What we see in the news keeps repeating itself; it has no consequences; no one says we cannot tolerate this horror. So it becomes something we take for granted. And many things like that are happening. There are ongoing tragedies that should jolt us.
The union, the state, and financial capitalism
The labor union today. Does it have a future?
The labor union as it has been conceived faces a very serious problem in this era: it no longer has anything to organize. Because the largest constituency now is unemployed people. It would have to be a union of the unemployed. Look at how far we’ve regressed: aside from there being no organization, the base for that organization is scarce.
However, other types of unions may emerge. Consumer unions, viewer unions, TikToker unions—whatever you want. There are many tools that were historically used in one way and can be used in another. What that implies is the possibility of creating a collective. There are more of us; we can do more. That collective has a much greater capacity for action than you or I have as individuals.
I advised a local union involved in the oil industry—a traditional left-wing union. And during negotiations over a list of demands, putting a communication plan on the table that laid everything out clearly in black and white changed everything. There are many tools that can be used in new ways.
And the state? What role does it play today?
The idea of the nation-state has been in crisis for some time now. We imagined that the collective could become so harmonized as to conceive of itself beyond a tribe—as a nation with shared sentiments—which could be governed by a state that embodies that nation. This crisis stems fundamentally from the massive operations of multinational corporations, which accelerated with financial capitalism. We moved from productive capitalism to financial capitalism, and this took on a whole new pace.
What do I see in the ultimate intent behind what they’re doing? Suicide. The sheer stupidity of people who view the world solely in terms of numbers, without caring about the consequences. Because at the heart of the decision of whether there is a state or not lies the decision of whether we think of others as part of the human condition. Solidarity means not being indifferent to others, and the media—which are fewer and fewer in number, because ever fewer interests own all the screens—encourage us to do the exact opposite: to think only of ourselves and our own particular interests. And the world itself is showing you the consequences of that.
Any book you’d recommend to help understand this moment?
Sennett, for example. La decadencia del hombre público, Carne y piedra, which is an examination of human behavior. And there’s a guy—I have it right here: El final de partida by Peter Turchin. He’s a Russian-American who analyzes the problems facing society today and compares them to other historical periods: times when the elite has multiplied to such an extent that it no longer has the space to fit harmoniously into society. Consequently, conflict begins to arise among the elites—which is what’s happening in the United States—while, on the other hand, the impoverishment of the base grows uncontrollably. That’s a bomb that is bound to explode. The guy places more emphasis on that than on the social base, and the analysis is quite interesting.
This foolish belief that technology is God doesn’t have much mileage. As human beings, we are sensitive creatures. People like Elon Musk, who dreams of colonizing Mars, are exceptional cases within humanity—and not exactly the most interesting ones.
I’ve always felt that what we do, deep down, is like that old story of the castaway who put a little note in a bottle, corked it, and tossed it out to see who would find it. You and I talking here is a little bottle tossed into the sea. And one day I ran into an old bluesman in New Orleans, and the man, shooting the breeze on the street, said to me, “You have to take music further than where you found it.” To me, that’s the story of the world. You arrive and find a lot of things, and part of the beauty of it all is managing to take what you received to another level.
