The new mayor of Cartagena, Dumek Turbay, demands an exorcism to use the official office

The new mayor of Cartagena de Indias, Dumek Turbay, began his mandate this Monday with a somewhat peculiar request: an exorcism. The office in the Customs Palace must be purified, Turbay said, after his predecessor and political rival, William Dau, ran the city from there for four years. “There is no way for me to enter that office, where the devil was,” stated the Liberal Party politician. “I ask the Catholic Church, and I mean it, to perform an exorcism,” he added. The petition was the continuation of a hostile rivalry between Turbay, former governor of the department of Bolívar, and Dau, a controversial anti-politician, who accuses all politicians, and recently especially Turbay, of being thieves.

So far, the new president has kept his word. The office on the second floor of the Mayor's Office – a colonial house that was once the main customs office in New Granada, once the largest port for the African slave trade in all of America – remains empty. Turbay works, for the moment, in the Palacio de la Proclamación, another architectural jewel in the historic center of Cartagena and where the departmental Government has an office. From there, he has begun his task of retaking, from the hands of the Police, the historic center that, according to him, “was occupied by pimps and jíbaros” during Dau's mandate.

Turbay won the elections at the end of October by selling himself as the anti-Dau. He swept almost 160,000 votes, equivalent to 42% of the vote. On Halloween, two days after the elections, the then mayor dressed up with a Turbay mask, and published a video on his social networks in which he said “Triki, Triki Halloween, I want money for myself, if there is no money for me “Your nose falls off.” The successor responded. He mocked his rival, 19 years his senior, in X. “I am very concerned about the Mayor's mental health. I pray to God for his sanity. We long, for the good of Cartagena, for a calm, cordial and harmonious connection process,” he wrote.

The candidate who represented anti-politics like Dau, Judith Pinedo, better known as Mariamulata, finished third in the territorial elections. The unpopularity of the outgoing mayor was evident, and Pinedo—who was already mayor and left office with high popularity—tried to distance herself from him during the campaign. Furthermore, the list that those close to the former mayor brought to the Council, under the name Fuera Malandrines, was far from the threshold for electing councilors in the city; He barely got 6,000 votes in a city with more than a million inhabitants.

The results were a 180-degree turn from those of 2019. Dau, a lawyer who had recently returned to his homeland after 15 years working in New York, decided to confront the political class that has been particularly strong in Cartagena, and corruption. that permeates Colombian politics. He went from being an unknown to winning the Mayor's Office with 29% of the votes. As mayor, however, the pandemic and difficulties in turning his talk of change into tangible facts affected his favorability, and his unpredictable personality became increasingly controversial.

His tenure was marked by strange, sometimes offensive incidents. In 2019, before he took office, a judge ordered him to rectify a video that he had leaked on social media in which he accused Turbay of corruption. In August 2021, an interview of his went viral in which he explained the rehabilitation work on the city's road network in a very peculiar way: with imitations of the sounds of trains, trucks and machines. “From today I allow myself to say u, u, u, u… in the end we start with the rehabilitation of the road network. I come from Santander Avenue and there we start: uuu, brrr, load the truck…,” said the then mayor.

A few months later, the Attorney General's Office filed charges against him “for alleged violation of the duty to treat other public officials with respect, impartiality and fairness,” after audio recordings of a Councilor's session were released in which Dau He treated his subordinates as “truhans,” “faggots,” and “scumbags.”

But the controversies were just the tip of the iceberg; His management was not well received either. In 2022, Cartagena was the only one of the five main Colombian capitals in which poverty increased. By the end of his term, Dau had a disapproval rate of 64% and 8 out of 10 Cartageneros considered that the city was not on the right track, according to Cartagena Como Vamos.

Turbay took advantage of this bad image to run a campaign criticizing his predecessor. At some point he accused him of being in charge of the “most corrupt” Mayor's Office in Colombia, a reproach to which Dau responded forcefully: “I have reported you as a thief.” In the end, the career politician beat the anti-politician, and he won the Mayor's Office. One of these days, he too will keep the office in the Customs Palace. When exactly he will be remains to be seen. He first awaits an appointment with the Catholic church, which has so far not officially responded to the public request.

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