Guillermo Torres has decided that his last accountability as mayor of Turbaco, a municipality of 114,000 inhabitants one hour from Cartagena de Indias, will be singing. He will honor his lifelong calling, the one that led him to be known as the FARC singer during the more than 30 years he spent as Julian Conrado in the guerrilla that laid down their weapons in 2016. That is why he is expectant and anxious on the morning of Thursday, October 12, two months before the presentation. He awaits the arrival of accordionist Jaime Arrieta while he attends an interview with EL PAÍS in an office on the outskirts of town. He insists that he and his friend must find the perfect tone for the guitar and accordion to work in harmony.
The arrival of the musician produces a radical change in the atmosphere of the office, full of advisors coming and going. Guillermo Torres leaves behind the impetus with which he says time and again that Simón Bolívar and Jesús de Nazaret were insurgents like him and that they taught him the value of defending the people from oppression. He no longer seeks to justify the struggle of a lifetime—even when he is not asked about it—but rather to surrender to the music that accompanied him since he was a teenager in Turbaco. He seems happy with the guitar, the anecdotes and the energy that he transmits in his political lyrics.
He begins to sing of his achievements, under the watchful eye of his advisors, sitting meters from his paintings of Bolívar and the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. “My health was in ruins, we have recovered it”, “I already talked about it with Gustavo [Petro]”Let our beloved Turbaco have his sewage done.” He also denounces corruption and assures that he did not steal a peso: “The corrupt in Turbaco do not stop insulting me”, “how much is there for us, a councilor told me”, “in Turbaco there is dignity, the one we know is no longer in charge ”. He says he is satisfied with his management, or at least having done the best he could: “I governed with a lot of love, that is my happiness, my legacy.”
The new compositions intermingle with the old ones. Torres can easily sing the song with which he protested against corruption in 1973. “They bought a dump truck for the town of Turbaco. I haven’t seen it in a while because it was already stolen”, “the mayor stole it when they were going to throw it away”. He explains that the Police accused him of disturbing public order because people gathered in the square to support him. “I understood what the State was when the Police took me prisoner. “It’s the kick of a police officer, it’s the club,” he remarks. According to him, being locked up fueled the insurgent feelings that had originated when he was 12 years old and his grandfather told him about the murder of Gaitán, a politician that Torres values for having denounced the banana massacre of 1929.
Four years ago, the mayor became a symbol of the transition from rifles to politics. He swept the elections, with a difference of almost 20 percentage points over his main rival. He was the only former FARC combatant to win a mayoralty in all of Colombia. Turbaco was celebrating: people filled the streets and interpreted the victory as the arrival of a man of the people who would guarantee a change, according to a report in EL PAÍS at that time. Now, the mayor makes a bittersweet assessment of his experience in the State that he once fought. “I have very great satisfaction and of course there are other things that I don’t,” he says.
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Torres lists several achievements. He says that he dismantled a parallel farm that he discovered when he came to office and that the collection increased by 5,000 million pesos (around 1.2 million dollars) in five months. He also mentions improvements in local hospital services and the construction of football, baseball and softball stadiums. “Money is enough when it is not stolen,” he emphasizes. This Thursday, he is happy because the Secretary of Culture has just presented him with “another beautiful thing from this administration”: some colorful plaques that bear the names of the streets in the center along with a typical flower, indigenous drawings and the inscription “Amando Venceremos (Amando Venceremos (Amando Venceremos (Amando Venceremos) 2020-2023)”, motto of his Mayor’s Office and part of a song he composed when he was imprisoned in Venezuela.
Frustrations, on the other hand, are linked to the fact that “it is not easy to govern a municipality surrounded by the piranhas of corruption.” “My enormous concern is that corruption is systemic, it is embedded in the viscera of this country,” he says. He comments that there was no way to get 10,000 million pesos (about 2.4 million dollars) of royalties that the Ministry of Mines has withheld from Turbaco due to a sanction against a previous administration. Likewise, he has encountered businessmen who ask him how much they should pay him to guarantee certain hires. “In that administration they asked me for 5%, in another case 10%,” he remembers one of them telling him, to whom he replied to contribute with a donation of computers.
The great unfinished task is the construction of aqueduct and sewage networks. It has been one of the promises of politicians for more than four decades and this year it is once again one of the main themes of the electoral campaign. “Three years passed and I was never stopped by the Government of Iván Duque. 300,000 million pesos are needed [alrededor de 71 millones de dólares]”, justifies Torres. However, he emphasizes that things began to change since Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president and leader of Colombia Humana, the party for which he was elected in 2019, came to power. The project, the mayor assures, is finally on track.
An insurgent raised in song
The figure of the president seems dissociated from the guerrilla. In Turbaco he is a myth in himself, a social fighter that his grandparents talked about and who was always perceived as someone more linked to music than to war crimes. Several neighbors recognize him for Abnegation, a composition about mothers that used to be sung at all parties. Likewise, even those who most emphatically repudiate his past seem accustomed and even indifferent to the fact that he is now the mayor. The merchant Viviana Duque, for example, recognizes that he “was not the end”, even though she would never vote for a former guerrilla because she was displaced by the violence in Antioquia.
Torres’ case contrasts with the situation experienced by Comunes, the party created by former FARC combatants after laying down their weapons. The movement has minimal levels of support and would not have any seats in Congress if it were not for the peace seats. Turbaco, on the other hand, elected a former insurgent as mayor and most of its inhabitants do not refer to his past unless asked directly.
The questions focus on its management. Critics see Torres as someone who was a distant figure in times of crisis, who disappeared from the streets of the town after reaching the Mayor’s Office, who did little. María Fernanda Carrasquilla, a cultural manager who works on the Conservative Party campaign, comments that she voted for him with enthusiasm and that she was disappointed by the lack of execution. “It couldn’t be done with love alone. Managing requires a prepared person, passion is not enough,” she says. However, she values the mayor as someone honest who had good intentions and who was unable to act due to constant obstacles from the Council. “He didn’t do much, but it wasn’t because he didn’t want to,” she admits. “He must be frustrated to see so much corruption.”
The president’s defenders prefer to highlight the achievements that were made despite the adversities. Luis Germán Campo, mayor between 2001 and 2003, explains that Torres put a stop to the Council’s interference in the municipal bureaucracy and that this generated a blockage on issues such as the budget and land formalization. “The management has not been bad. It has been an administration that has defended itself in the midst of tidal wave what it means to be a different politician,” he says. Jesús Medina, a 36-year-old engineer who is a candidate for Mayor of the centrist party Dignidad y Compromiso, thinks something similar. He adds that “history will recognize the progress” on issues of transparency, sports and culture.
Total peace
The mayor is emphatic that he will never take up arms again. He does not regret having done it “to practice justice” 40 years ago, but he considers that today’s conditions are different: more young people go to universities, there are other tools to do politics – such as social networks – and Colombia has a president of left. He says that he has faith in Gustavo Petro’s total peace, although he finds it a cold name and prefers to call it “peace with justice and love.” “I’m not going to back down, even if they kill me. I learned something he said [el expresidente] Álvaro Uribe: ‘I prefer them in the mountains throwing lead and not in a square making speeches.’ That’s why I prefer to stay here,” he remarks.
However, the former FARC singer regrets the difficulties in achieving peace. He points to the precedent of the annihilation of the Patriotic Union, a leftist political party of which he was a co-founder and which emerged during La Uribe’s failed peace negotiations in the 1980s. “There is a greater risk of being killed in peace than in war,” he says. According to figures from the Institute of Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), 1,550 social leaders and 399 peace signatories have been murdered since the agreement signed in 2016.
Torres still does not have defined plans for January 1, when his term ends. But he assures that he will continue singing: “I can serve the people with an aqueduct, like I did with Cañaveral.” [un corregimiento]. I can bring joy to baseball and soccer players by building a stadium for them. But I have made people happier by singing because I make them dance, laugh, jump, jump. More than Che Guevara and Bolívar, I am cantinflista”.
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