Enjoy me while you can, because they're going to kill me. Jaime Garzon
25 years ago, the Guardian newspaper published a short obituary of Jaime Garzon ( www.theguardian.com/news/1999/aug/18/guardianobituaries.martinhodgson ) the Colombian humorist and peace activist. To commemorate the recent 25th anniversary of his death, I would like to offer the following more personal and anecdotal account of his life and impact on Colombian society.
Jaime was born in the capital of Colombia, Bogota, into a middle class family in a suburb within walking distance of the historical centre. His father was a school teacher, a great joker and a womaniser, including with some of his students. He was also Jaime's great friend and idol until he suddenly died at the age of 38 of a heart attack.
Jaime liked to be like his father, to make people laugh but also to read and discuss topics that seemed beyond his age. His first girlfriend, when he was 15, was one of his school teachers, who was 25 when they began their relationship. He used to spend time with her at her family's house, going into the spare room which was set up as a photographic dark-room, but developing film was not the main activity.
At some point his teacher's father, an ex-military man got sick of seeing Jaime in his house and banned him from coming, but Jaime made use of his great ability to mimic voices, and would ring up pretending to be an older friend of his teacher, who happened to share the same conservative right-wing politics of his teacher's father. They would chat together before the teacher's father would happily pass the phone to his daughter. Later the father had a stroke, lost movement in his body and became blind, and Jaime would come to the house still mimicking the voice of the right-wing older friend with the complicity of his girlfriend and her mother.
Later in life, the teacher, his first girlfriend would say publicly after his death “Jaime was my only love and I can't forget him and nor do I want to” forget him".
Jaime studied law at the Colombian National University, joked around, was involved in politics. His personality and intelligence provided him with strange and interesting jobs: a school teacher in poor schools, mayor of a small rural town outside of Bogota, and then with the United Nations in Colombia.
Afterwards friends from university who knew his talent for mimicry and ability to make people laugh, convinced him into presenting a zero-budget television program that combined politics and humour and general madness. The program didn’t seem to follow any of the established rules and most of the content was improvised by Jaime and his co-presenter.
The program was strange and refreshing but above all, behind Jaime's improvised jokes and skits were dangerous truths that nobody else dared to tell. Truths about the corruption of the political class and the governing oligarchic families; truths about the ever increasing infiltration of drug money into all parts of society, from the President to the humble doorman. Jaime's fame continued to grow.
Around this time, owing to his friendship with Cesar Gaviria, the President of Colombia at the time and his experience working with indigenous communities in the country, he formed part of the committee drafting the new constitution of Colombia. His main input was to ensure that the constitution was translated into many of the indigenous languages of Colombia so that the indigenous communities could understand the terms used in the document, if necessary, translating the terms into concepts that they could assimilate culturally and intellectually. He combined this work with his television work, in which the same President was often the subject of his satire.
Eventually Jaime's first program dissolved under the general chaos in which he was accustomed to work, but was soon after replaced with another program on a different channel with a much expanded budget. Here, Jaime started to develop his “characters” with which he would become so closely associated. These characters were “common people” , a doorman, a bootblack, a cook and servant in the presidential palace, an opinionated right-wing retired clerk. These were people who had never been considered worthy of attention in the class-hierarchical society of Colombia. And they were usually partly based on somebody from Jaime's life. The retired clerk was his first girlfriend's father. The doorman was partly based on a security guard who once refused to let him into his own house because his girlfriend at the time was there with another man.
To this day, people quote the sayings of Jaime's “characters” and they have become part of the general culture of the country. As the second program progressed, ever more popular, Jaime became more and more fearless with his jibes against the unpunished murderers and thieves who populated the Colombian upper-class. He and his family received constant death threats but he always said “If those people wanted to kill me, they would have done it by” now" and refused any kind of protection or bodyguard and continued to live in his small flat opposite the house where he grew up and where his mother continued to live.
At various times Jaime was heard to say that he didn’t expect to live any longer than his father, and that in fact, it would be a kind of betrayal if he did. As his television program became more popular and his humorous truth telling more hair-raising, his family and friends feared increasingly for his safety. This was an era in Colombia in which drug-barons and guerilla and para-military armed groups did as they pleased, bought presidents, paid for elections and built their own mini-kingdoms complete with zoos and hippopotamuses. When Pablo Escobar agreed to hand himself in, he built his own 5 star jail and offered to pay the entire national debt of Colombia as a sweetener.
By this stage Escobar was dead, shot to death on a Medellin rooftop, but any journalist or public figure who thought it was his or her job to tell the truth to power, had 3 choices: leave the country, self-censor or prepare for the worst. In the poor suburbs of Medellin or Bogotá it was easy to find a pair of slim, beautiful teenage boys who would assassinate any random stranger from the back of a motorbike for a few hundred dollars: one to drive and one to shoot. Before the “job” they would pray piously to their virgin saint for money, success and a sacred blessing.
Journalists in Western countries may consider carefully what they should say about Israel and Gaza in order to have the privilege of continuing to pay their mortgages, but in Colombia, Guillermo Cano, the director and owner of the best newspaper in the country, El Espectador , received a spray of bullets through the driver-side window of his car and did not live to tell the tale. Like Jaime, he had been warned-off multiple times by the Medellin Cartel and others, but also like Jaime, he wasn’t for turning.
Almost everybody hoped that Jaime, as the jester, the clown, would be given some immunity from the usual logic of violence and intimidation; that the Colombian love of laughter and irreverence, of the “mama-gallista” would outweigh the sinister dark forces, the “enemies of the peace” who went unnamed. As a old street-vendor on a dusty road in El Salvador said to me, “Here they kill you, but nobody did it” .
In the last years of his life Jaime hosted epic dinner-parties with an eclectic collection of influential Colombians as well as friends and family. These dinners took place in the home he sometimes shared with his longest-term on-again, off-again girlfriend, the woman he called “The mother” of my children" even though they were not his biological children. He only invited people he respected to these dinner parties, people he considered honorable, or at the least honest, and his aim was to start conversations and dialog between people who normally would never talk to each other, in the interests of fostering peace in the country. One time he invited a famous ex-guerilla leader and the man who he had tried to assassinate, an ex-mayor of Bogota. The two enemies ended up getting drunk together and conversing long into the night.
Jaime, as a personal favour to an ex-lover agreed to negotiate with a left-wing guerilla group who had kidnapped the ex-lovers brother for ransom. He was successful and his ex-lover, against his requests and wishes, told other families in the same situation about what he had done. This led to a series of contacts and negotiations with various armed groups which only enraged the powers-that-be even more. He was “negotiating with terrorists” as the Gringos like to phrase it. Eventually he learnt that a contract had been put out on his life, and that he could expect a visit from the young men on a motorbike at any time. Jaime said more than once “Enjoy me while you can, because they're going to kill me” .
When he found out about the contract on his life, he said that he wasn’t going to leave the country, nor seek refuge in the United States or anywhere else, nor obtain bodyguards or any other protection. Always believing in the power of dialog over the power of violence, he made contact with the para-military mafia leader who had ordered his death, and asked to speak face to face with him.
Whether he spoke directly with him or an underling we don't know, but the message he received in reply was that the death-contract could not be cancelled and that he should take every precaution, but that if he survived the paramilitary leader would meet with him. Several days later as he was driving in the morning to the studio, a car drove alongside his and a passenger fired into the drivers window. Jaime was killed and his car rolled into a concrete electricity pole. His girlfriend ("the mother of my children"), heard what had happened and arrived at the scene of his death but could not bring herself to look inside the car where Jaime lay dead.
He was 38 years old, the age at which his father had died and the age that he had always said he would not out-live.
On the day of his funeral, so many people took to the streets to say goodbye, that a footbridge collapsed and further chaos ensued. The ten year anniversaries of his death are still commemorated and one of the countries biggest broadcasters created a meticulously researched, 90 episode, television series about his life, called “Garzon Lives!” which has been repeated several times.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez said about his books “I didn't invent anything. In” Colombia, the truth is stranger than fiction". Many aspects of the story of Jaime Garzon have the ring of fiction about them: He was a famously ugly man, with a mouth full of infected and rotting teeth (which all ended up falling out) but he collected as lovers some of Colombia's most beautiful women, actresses and television presenters; in a country in which lying is almost a cultural norm, he had a Quaker-like commitment to telling the truth at all times even in the most awkward situations and the fact that he died, as he had always predicted at the same age as his father;
Garzon's death, 25 years ago, may seem premature and pointless but his life and work at least showed that peace is possible.