Juanes helps put out peace

Singer Juanes edited the Sunday edition of Bogota’s El Tiempo daily, an issue that focused on the peace process in Colombia.

The aim of the effort was to make “the content of the newspaper have a purposeful, optimistic, inclusive and hopeful vision, without ignoring the country’s reality,” the singer, whose real name is Juan Esteban Aristizabal, said.

The singer and chief editor for a day of the country’s main newspaper believes in reconciliation and forgiveness to achieve peace.

The initiative to edit the paper for a day was inspired by a similar project at The Independent daily in May 2.006, when music icon Bono edited an edition on the impact of AIDS in Africa.

Appearing on the front page of El Tiempo for this edition is a diagram of a target-shooting game and crossed arms and on the inner pages all the articles allude to reconciliation.

Among other things, the Sunday edition includes the interview of a young Indian with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who assures the reporter that he would like “to spend more on books than on weapons.”

Other articles mention in their titles such things as “the end of the conflict is a profitable investment” and “how the mentality of Colombians would change without the war.”

The daily also discusses “the years in which Colombia was at peace” and the “marvelous” things Colombians could do if the country were not in conflict.

Other headlines included “forgiveness has healing powers” and “Schools that are defusing violence from the classrooms.”

In addition, the edition contains an interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams and another with former Salvadoran guerrilla Joaquin Villalobos, who feels that now “the challenge is to make intelligent policy.”

The edition also includes other testimonials regarding the armed internal conflict and examples of peace proposals, and there are also special articles written by people such as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Spanish singer Miguel Bose, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and by Juanes himself.

All the sections of Sunday’s edition El Tiempo are focused on peace, including the sports, social, culture and entertainment sections, and on the editorial page, all the columnists’ writings deal with the same theme : reconciliation.