You knew.

You all knew.

And you shook hands anyway.

A sofa in an apartment, capital city, 2005

The kind of meeting that never happened, but everyone came out alive

The financier pours the drinks, the ministers queue up like good boys

Privatizations on the table, backroom deals, back pocket noise

They took what belonged to us before we even knew the price

Every tender, every contract, every favor had its price

Call it a coincidence, call it business, call it Tuesday afternoon

The whole country watched it leak online and nobody faced a courtroom soon

We got the tapes, we got the names

we got the dates written down

But the men on those recordings are still running this whole town

We're the suckers

we're the voters

paying for the suits that sold us out before we ever woke up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

this is not the country that they promised when we showed up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

Gorila. Gorila.

Our guy. Our guy.

Gorila. Gorila.

You know his name.

A young man with a laptop writing what nobody wanted out

A quiet village, February night, two bodies and a case with no doubt

The hitman got his twenty-five, the driver locked away in a cell

But the man who wrote the check walked free — the court said it was hard to tell

Acquitted twice while the last article he wrote sits unfinished still

You want to know what permanently ends a journalist? It isn't skill

It's knowing that the judge, the cop, the prosecutor all belong

To the same group of people who have been running this for far too long

We got the shooter's full confession

we got the money trail

But the oligarch who paid for it keeps walking without jail

We're the suckers

we're the voters

paying for the suits that sold us out before we ever woke up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

this is not the country that they promised when we showed up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

We're the suckers

we're the voters

Their guy in the police force

their guy on the bench

their guy in the prosecutor's chair, covering up the stench

A former president called it a mafia state — nobody disagreed

Every party, every decade, every government, the same creed:

protect the ones above you, let the little people bleed

We're the suckers

we're the voters

paying for the suits that sold us out before we ever woke up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

this is not the country that they promised when we showed up

We're the suckers

we're the voters

We're the suckers

we're the voters

We're the suckers

we're the voters

this is not the country — this was never our country

The apartment still exists.

The recordings still exist.

The men on those recordings?

Still in office.

Gorila.