Antonio Caballero, a life of kicking against the powerful

“A pawn dressed in silver, wept in a mockery. Nobody moved, nobody left. Some denied the evidence of what they had seen: No what’s going, what’s going. The entire square was standing and in absolute silence ”.

Antonio Caballero (Bogotá, 1945-2021) thus narrated the death of the banderillero Manolo Montoliú in the Plaza de la Maestranza in Seville on May 1, 1992 when he was gored by the bull that José Mari Manzanares was fighting. This Friday, the bullfighting writer and chronicler died in Bogotá at the age of 76. With him are decades of caricature, essay and columns that have marked Colombian political history. He was a collaborator of MRT with his chronicles of bulls and analysis From the other side of the Atlantic.

Belonging to the Bogota aristocracy, born in one of the most traditional families in the capital – son of the also writer Eduardo Caballero and brother of the painter Luis Caballero – the columnist was a rebel from his origin and from his youth he wrote against the establishment to which he belonged. , in the magazine Alternative.

But his cartoons and writings also marked the history of newspapers such as Time, The viewer, the Spanish magazine Change 16, Diary 16 and of Week. Owner of an enviable prose and inexhaustible historical knowledge, he maintained the column in the magazine for decades until in November 2020, the political turns in that medium, led him to resign. Thus, the man who typed for years launched himself into the digital world as a columnist for The danieles.

In his last text – which he was now reading on video columns – true to his style, he charged against the Government. “President Iván Duque has a curious relationship with the history of his country, Colombia. You can tell they were taught it in Washington. And on top of that he did not assimilate it well, “he wrote. At the foot of the news, he also stood before the repression during the national strike and spoke about the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to Colombia, in suspense until the last minute: “It is that with it, what matters most to them is at stake. to our governments, which is not the reality but the “image” of Colombia. Killing people is fine. But don’t let it be known ”.

His last years as a columnist were not far from controversy. His closeness to bullfighting – which he had grouped in books such as Bullfighting, Bullfighter and Public – and positions considered misogynistic or anachronistic, earned him criticism.

Poetry and musicality were always present in his life and work. Without remedy (1983) his best-known novel was, he said, “the poem wrapper.” “What justifies poetry and what makes it so important is that it is the only way to say things that cannot be said otherwise,” he said in Hangman Kicks, an interview with the journalist Juan Carlos Iragorri. To him, Caballero gave his best definition of how he would like to be remembered: a man who was on the side of the defeated and kicked to the end against power.

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