Antanas Mockus

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Mockus (2012)

Antanas Mockus Šivickas (born March 25, 1952 in Bogotá , Colombia ) is a Colombian philosopher , mathematician , politician and former mayor of Bogotá.

Family and education

Antanas Mockus is the son of Lithuanian immigrants, Nijole and Alfonsas, who fled the aftermath of the Second World War. At the age of two he was already able to read and in 1969 he graduated from the French school Liceo Francés Louis Pasteur de Bogotá with honors. From September 1969 to 1979 he studied mathematics with a scholarship in Dijon , France and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia , Colombia. In 1974 he traveled to Vilnius , Lithuania, where he was asked by friends to stay. He then replied, "My life in Colombia has a purpose".

University career

In 1988 he obtained his master's degree in philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, after having previously taught there as a professor of topology . In the same year he became vice rector of the university; from 1991 he was rector. In this position, he became popular because of his unusual leadership style and novel pedagogy . He became known beyond Bogotá for polemical and sensational actions: for example, he rode his bike to work - which is extremely unusual in Bogotá - , grabbed his genital area at a mass event in Manizales and moved in front of a noisy auditorium that did not close him Let words come, his pants down and presented his bum . Due to the scandal that followed, he was removed from office in 1993; nevertheless, Mockus decided to run for the post of mayor of Bogotá.

According to his own statements, he was not aware of the consequences of his way of protesting at the time. Two students were suspended from their school when they too pulled down their pants. In an interview, Mockus said that taxi drivers on strike used this kind of protest as better than throwing stones.

Political career

After an election campaign without advertising, without promises and with little financial means (less than 1,000 US dollars ), he defeated his main opponent Enrique Peñalosa in the election , who replaced him in 1998. On January 1, 1995, Mocku's first term as mayor began, which ended in April 1997. His government was made up of academics rather than senior politicians.

He managed to clean up the capital's finances by only releasing funds when they were made available. Although many of his methods were unpopular, such as fuel taxation, he won over citizens. He reduced the death statistics by banning pyrotechnic means, but above all by introducing his most popular regulation, La hora zanahoria . He became famous abroad for his measure to educate motorists to comply with the traffic regulations by means of pantomimes . Through his successful, voluntary campaign to save water, he demonstrated the efficiency of his educational methods applied to the masses. During his tenure, the citizens' attitudes towards their city changed. In 1998, 67% felt that the city was worth living in, in stark contrast to the 75% who previously thought it was not worth living in. When the city was suffering from dehydration, Mockus appeared in a TV commercial in which he turned off the water in the shower while soaping up. At the time, this reduced water consumption by 14%. The rate has improved to 40% these days.

During his tenure, Mockus kept surprising people with his eccentric streak. He married a social worker in a circus dressed in traditional fíque costumes . Sometimes he wore superhero suits and improvised rap songs. Sometimes he carried a pink plastic sword into the government building to symbolically fight for higher grants.

He stepped down to run for the 1998 presidential election. The biggest mistake of his career turned out to be his admission that he would only run for vice-president as a partner of the politician Noemí Sanín , who was considered a clear representative of the well-known political caste. The citizens who elected Mockus mayor did so because he was a representative of a new social order. As a consequence, he was defeated by Andrés Pastrana Arango .

On January 1, 2001, he was re-elected mayor by the citizens of Bogotá and lost this office in 2003 to Luis Eduardo Garzón .

Presidential candidacies

In 2004, Mockus announced his candidacy for the 2006 presidential election in Colombia . He justified the unusually early time of this announcement with the fact that one should enjoy the path as much as the destination. His candidacy is supported by the Movimiento Alianza Social Indígena , a party of indigenous representatives. To prepare for his candidacy, Mockus spent a few months at Oxford University (Nuffield College) to reflect on political philosophy. He was also a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government for two weeks in 2004. He returned to Harvard in the fall semester of 2004/2005 to give two Spanish lectures there. In November he traveled to the University of Virginia to speak about positive social mechanisms associated with his tenure as mayor of Bogotá.

In the parliamentary elections in March 2006, his electorate team "Visionarios con Antanas" did not win a single seat. In the same month, Mockus declared homosexual marriage and the adoption of children in such a goal of his candidacy. This is in contrast to the incumbent President Uribe, who only wants to enable a registered civil partnership.

Mockus received a little more than 134,000 votes in the presidential election in May 2006 and was clearly beaten by Uribe. After the election, he announced that he would run again in 2010, but he did not want to seek the office of mayor of Bogotá again. In October 2006, Uribe announced that a commission was to prepare the educational targets for 2015, and Antanas Mockus has been a member since then.

Although several parties have tried to win Mockus as a candidate for the renewed mayoral election in 2007, Mockus has shown no such interest. At the end of June 2007 he reiterated that his aim was to use educational means to convince voters to use their voting rights more intelligently. This project is called Voto Vital , which means the most important voice.

Mockus announced that three ex-mayor of Bogota - Lucho Garzón, Enrique Peñalosa and he - with the new party Alianza Verde together in the election campaign for the presidency in 2010 would enter. Since Peñalosa wants to apply for the office of mayor of Bogotá, the candidate should be decided by poll on November 25, 2009 between Garzón and Mockus. On March 14, 2010, Mockus was elected presidential candidate and chairman of the Green Party.

As the first candidate in Colombian history, Mockus returned 1.76 million euros to the state at the beginning of April 2010, which his party would have allowed for voting. He stated that the state should use these funds to build schools. With 21.49% of the votes, he came in second in the first round of the 2010 presidential election behind Juan Manuel Santos from the Partido de la U with 46.56%.

Mockus also lost the runoff election with 27.5 percent of the vote against Juan Manuel Santos, who achieved around 69 percent.

Senate election 2018

After leaving the party in 2011, he returned to the Senate in 2018 as number 1 on the Allianza Verde's list in the parliamentary elections in Colombia in 2018 and achieved the highest number of votes in the capital Bogotá with 536,252 votes.

illness

In April 2010, Mockus announced that doctors had identified him with early symptoms of Parkinson's disease .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Former Mayor of Bogota Antanas Mockus, man who curbed traffic accidents with mimes Skaitykite daugiau: http://www.15min.lt/en/article/culture-society/former-mayor-of-bogota-antanas-mockus- man-who-curbed-traffic-accidents-with-mimes-528-343384 # ixzz2yauSHsEr Follow us: @ 15minlt on Twitter - 15min on Facebook. Retrieved April 11, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Gobernar no es solo expedir normas, gobernar es educarnos - Interview January 18, 2007 "Gobernar no es solo expedir normas, gobernar es educarnos" - El Comercio / Entrevista / Miércoles, 28 de marzo de 2007 ( Memento of November 21, 2008 in Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ a b c El peculiar estilo que recuperó a Bogotá El peculiar estilo que recuperó a Bogotá - El Comercio / Entrevista / Miércoles, 28 de marzo de 2007 ( Memento from January 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Antanas Mockus no se lanzará a la Alcaldía de Bogotá. EL TIEMPO, July 25, 2007, accessed April 11, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Encuesta definirá candidato presidencial entre Lucho y Mockus → [http://www.eltiempo.com/elecciones2010/ARTICULO-WEB-PLANTILLA_NOTA_INTERIOR-6052907.html Archivos de noticias de Colombia y el Mundo desde 1911] (Link not available)
  6. ↑ Antanas Mockus es el candidato presidencial y jefe de los Verdes - Archivo - Archivo Digital de Noticias de Colombia y el Mundo desde 1.990 - eltiempo.com
  7. ↑ Mockus renunció a $ 4,500 million otorgados por el Estado por reposición de votos - Archivo - Archivo Digital de Noticias de Colombia y el Mundo desde 1,990 - eltiempo.com
  8. ↑ Despite electoral success for Santos runoff election in Colombia → {{Web archive | url = http: //newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/list/id/994633 | wayback = 20100603042744 | text = Colombia: Santos and Mockus have to go to the runoff}} (Link not available)
  9. ↑ Rotunda victoria de Santos en las presidenciales de Colombia , El País of June 21, 2010
  10. ↑ Con más de 536 mil votos, Antanas Mockus regresó a la política eltiempo.com, from March 12, 2018 (Spanish)
  11. ↑ Mockus revela que tiene inicio de párkinson, pero pide que no se le 'crucifique' por eso - Archivo - Archivo Digital de Noticias de Colombia y el Mundo desde 1.990 - eltiempo.com

Web links

Commons : Antanas Mockus  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Mockus, Antanas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mockus Šivickas, Aurelijus Rutenis Antana (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Colombian philosopher, mathematician and politician, and former mayor of Bogotá
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Bogotá , Colombia