Antanas Mockus
Aurelijus Rutenis Antanas Mockus Šivickas (Bogotá, March 25, 1952) is a Colombian mathematician, politician and philosopher.
He was mayor of Bogotá on two occasions, candidate for vice presidency (1998) and for the presidency of the Republic (2010-2014). He was a senator of the Republic of Colombia from 2018 to 2020, after obtaining the second highest vote in the legislative elections of that year. He was also the president of the liquidated Corporación Visionarios por Colombia (Corpovisionarios), a non-profit center of thought and action. a profit that investigates, advises, designs and implements actions to achieve voluntary changes in collective behavior.
With his studies on Philosophy and Mathematics, he has achieved titles such as: Master of Philosophy from the National University of Colombia, Bachelor of Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Dijon, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Paris XIII, and from the National university of Colombia.
Biography
The son of Alfonsas Mockus and the sculptor and ceramicist Nijolė Šivickas, immigrants from Lithuania, Antanas Mockus graduated from the French Lyceum in Bogotá in 1969. He then moved to Mexico and France, where he studied mathematics.
In 1972 he graduated from the University of Burgundy (Dijon) and obtained a master's degree in philosophy from the National University of Colombia in 1988, writing a thesis on the notion of representation in the prior understanding of being as availability.
Professional career
National University of Colombia
In 1975 Antanas Mockus was appointed assistant instructor attached to the mathematics department at the Faculty of Sciences of the National University of Colombia (UNAL). Between 1977 and 1981 he was an associate instructor and between 1982 and 1988 he was an assistant professor at the UNAL. In the following decade he was a member and director of the Federici research group that worked in the field of education and science teaching at UNAL.
Mockus was appointed rector general of the National University in 1991, after having served as the university's academic vice-rector. In this same year he was one of the founding members of the Colombian Society of Epistemology. During his administration, he became notorious for various eccentricities and controversial actions such as going to his office by bicycle, the incident where he was accused of grabbing his genitals in front of to a crowd, or the well-remembered episode of dropping his pants in the León de Greiff auditorium of the National University, to show his behind in front of a group of more than 1,000 protesting students who were preventing him from making a speech.
After this unexpected intervention, he must resign as rector.
Political career
Mayor of Bogota (1995-1997)
Antanas Mockus ran as an independent candidate for mayor in the 1994 Bogotá local elections. With an atypical campaign without publicity, founded instead on the doctrine of citizen culture, he defeated his main opponent Enrique Peñalosa. As a curious fact, in a debate held at the National University with Enrique Peñalosa, they were attacked by students, one of whom hit Mockus, when he had shown another student a red card as a sign of his rudeness.
His administration reduced central administration expenses and capitalized the Empresa de Energía de Bogotá (EEB), "an operation without which the district's finances would have been seriously affected." They earned him the distinction as one of the promoters of the new Bogotá. He managed to reduce violent deaths by prohibiting the use of fireworks by individuals and above all by implementing his most popular measure & # 34; The carrot hour & # 34;. In general terms, this norm of "citizen culture" restricts the time at which night-time establishments or liquor outlets must legally close.
Other known measures during his administration were the "total disarmament of the city," criticized by the then commander of the Military Forces General Harold Bedoya, he used mimes that taught civic culture and the famous card (making reference to those used by soccer referees) as part of the Bogotá Coqueta campaign.
But it was with the voluntary water saving campaign, where he best demonstrated the effectiveness of his pedagogical methods applied on a mass scale.
During his tenure as mayor, he did not stop surprising people with eccentric appearances, such as his wedding in a circus with a social worker, wearing costumes made of fique and riding an elephant. These appearances also occurred before his mayoralty, such as when he used superhero costumes and even improvised rap songs.
For many Bogotanos and Colombians, he was the mayor of Bogotá who contributed the most to getting the inhabitants to respect the rules of the city. The interesting thing about this achievement was that he carried it out through ingenious actions far from repression or campaigns traditional.
1998 Presidential Aspiration
He resigned from his position as mayor in early 1997, shortly before the official end of his term as mayor (being succeeded by the director of the Institute of Culture and Tourism at that time, the physicist Paul Bromberg), in order to launch himself into the presidential elections of 1998. He looked for new ways to survive, gave paid lectures and worked as a reporter in a newscast. At first he ran for president, but later agreed to be a vice-presidential candidate to complement Noemí Sanín, a representative of the traditional political class, although a dissident of the Colombian Conservative Party. During the presidential campaign he once again starred in scandalous acts such as throwing water in the face of candidate Horacio Serpa during a debate to exemplify one of his pedagogical methods.
Mayor of Bogotá (2001-2004)
In the local elections of Bogotá in 2000, Mockus returned to the political scene as a candidate again for mayor, although this time endorsed by the Alianza Social Independiente (ASI), having to apologize to the capital electorate for having abandoned the position in his previous administration; in a few months he became the only rival of former minister María Emma Mejía, whom he ended up defeating by more than 100,000 votes.
A second term (January 2001 - January 2004) allowed him to recover the image of an independent and efficient politician before public opinion and prompted him to seek the presidency of the Republic. He continued developing and expanding the Transmilenio transportation system by means of Bogotá articulated buses that was implemented by Enrique Peñalosa while continuing other unfinished works at the end of its period.
Mockus's mayorship ended in 2004, to be replaced by Luis Eduardo Garzón.
Gap Year
Mockus decided to abandon his work activities, in order to travel and converse around the world. After spending two weeks at the Kennedy School of Government in the United States in 2004, Mockus returned to Harvard as a visiting professor of Romance languages to teach classes of Spanish in the second semester of 2004.
In 2004, the daily Draugas chose Mockus as the Lithuanian of the year. In 2005 he was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College (Social Sciences) Oxford University. In October of the same year he visited for the first time the Lithuanian community in Chicago, Illinois, which is the largest outside of Lithuania, and made a speech in Lithuanian.
2006 presidential and parliamentary aspirations
In the 2006 Colombian legislative elections, he presented his Visionarios con Antanas movement, but was defeated and did not obtain any seats, neither in the Senate nor in the House of Representatives. Despite this, he continued in the presidential campaign, with the Alianza Social Indígena party. In the presidential elections of May of the same year Mockus came fourth, behind Álvaro Uribe (president who, at the time, was running for re-election), Carlos Gaviria Díaz and Horacio Serpa.
After this, he dedicated himself to structuring the Visionaries project hand in hand with the indigenous people, with the intention of gaining followers beyond Bogotá to increase what he describes as a “strange but valuable” minority (referring to those who voted for him), since according to what he says, she allowed herself to be seduced without the tools of traditional politics (without publicity, nor politicking, nor populist promises). In 2007, for the regional elections, he promoted the Voto Vital campaign, which sought to make voters aware of the importance of thinking about their vote.
Presidential candidate for the Green Party in 2010
Since September 2009, Mockus joined the Colombian Green Party along with former Bogotá mayors Luis Eduardo Garzón and Enrique Peñalosa. To choose their candidate for the presidency, the three former mayors appeared to hold a popular consultation, which would take place during the 2010 legislative elections, the date on which some senators and representatives to the chamber of the same party were also elected, along the mockusiana were elected: John Sudarsky to the Senate and Ángela María Robledo in the Chamber for Bogotá. Mockus was the winner of the primary election held on March 14, 2010, leaving Peñalosa in second place and & in third place. #34;I fight" Garzón.
In the first days of April 2010 there was a rapprochement between Mockus and Sergio Fajardo in order to unify their political proposals so that Fajardo would be the vice-presidential formula for Mockus. The latter withdrew from the electoral contest from which he he was already a presidential candidate to become the vice-president in the candidacy of Antanas Mockus for the Green Party. The main reasons why he accepted the programmatic agreement was due to the lack of resources to finance the campaign and the compatibility of his proposals with the of Mockus. However, the alliance was only consolidated on April 12, 2010 at the request of Fajardo himself. Liliana Caballero was provisionally registered as Mockus's vice-presidential formula.
On May 30, 2010 Mockus obtained the second highest vote with 21.49% of the valid votes, but due to the fact that the most voted candidate, Juan Manuel Santos, did not obtain half plus one of the total votes, both attended the a second round on June 20. In this round Mockus did not reach the presidency, but he obtained 3,588,819 votes, that is, 27.5% of the votes.
He is the protagonist of the documentary La Vida es Sagrada together with Katherine Miranda, which portrays what happened in 2010 during the GREEN WAVE and why he later adhered to the Santos campaign for peace.
Abandonment of the Green Party and petition to the Independent Social Alliance
On June 9, 2011, Antanas Mockus made his departure from the Green Party official, rejecting the support of the former president of the republic, Álvaro Uribe and his Partido de la U, for his candidate for mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa. Subsequently, Antanas joined the Alianza Social Independiente party (known as the Indigenous Social Alliance until July 2011) and on August 10, he registered as a candidate for mayor of Bogotá with that party's endorsement. However, on September 30, he resigned from his candidacy to support Gina Parody, who would be defeated by Gustavo Petro.
Return of the Green Party and leads its candidacy for the Senate of the Republic
The president of the Green Alliance, Jorge Iván Ospina, confirmed that the former mayor of Bogotá and former presidential candidate Antanas Mockus will head the Senate list of that group in the 2018 elections. He is awaiting a possible ruling by the CNE, in which his election can be declared null for being the legal representative of a State contractor company.
During the opening of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia Mockus made a bald head in front of his roommates during the exit speech of the president of the Congress Efraín Cepeda. According to Mockus, this was done because the attendees in the room did not pay attention to Cepeda's speech: «Forgive me for the repetition, but nothing better occurred to me at that moment. What was key was not to let that moment pass. It is a custom that must be changed and customs are changed, sometimes, with specific interventions that try to be pedagogical.", Antanas Mockus is currently president of the Alianza Verde party.
Private life
Mockus is married to Adriana Córdoba. He has four children Audra, Manuel José, Laima and Dala.He has denied being an atheist and considers himself a Catholic.
In 2010, during the presidential campaign, Mockus revealed to him that he had Parkinson's disease. In 2019, he underwent surgery to treat his disease.
During an interview in 2016, Mockus stated that he had been the victim of sexual abuse by a gallery owner.
Disputes
In Mockus's opinion, the murder of Dilan Cruz was not a murder but a homicide, ignoring the legal medicine opinion.
During his first mayoralty, he tried to sell the Bogota telecommunications company.
Works
- The School Borders: joints between school knowledge and extracurricular knowledge, 1995
- Decentralization and public order, 1997
- Education for peace: a pedagogy to consolidate social and participatory democracy, 1999
- Social Transformation and Transformation of the University, 2001
- Characterization of violence in Bogotá: final report, 2002
- Fulfill to live together: factors of coexistence and types of young people for their relationship with norms and agreements, 2003
- Thinking of the university, 2012
- Antipodes of Violence: Challenges of citizen culture for the crisis of (in)security in Latin America, 2012
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