The creator of Santo Cachón has left

FIt was loud, bestial. The Nissan with license plates JCW-407 where the son of the Trinta township was traveling, in Tomarrazón (municipality of La Guajira) was left like the soul of an accordion, wrinkled, smashed against a huge ceiba tree on the side of the road, near the crossing of San Roque, where the road to the sea forks for travelers to enter the carboniferous heart of Cesar.

At that moment, among the twisted cans of that white vehicle, the immortality that had already been written in thousands of songs by the most beloved peasant of the Vallenato country, Romualdo Brito López, began. He left at 67, at dawn on November 20, 2020, a year that no one in the world will forget.

There were the verses of the “Indian who has everything and has nothing”, such as the lyrics of one of the songs that in the voice of Silvestre Dangond sang more than 20 thousand souls in the Parque de la Leyenda Vallenata in December 2018: La Defunct

And yes, perhaps the most pela’os will establish with those letters who it was, although the story for Santander goes further, it could be said that it returns almost three decades, when in 1994, by a decision that seemed negligible, Brito gave them the ‘ Cachacos ‘those from Bucaramanga a piazo and’ song (piece): El Santo Cachón.

Brito repeated many times that he was sorry for that composition because – according to him – he had nothing. Because for many it offended women, because although he was able to hide how he was born, there were those who said that being inspired by the image of a Sacred Heart that adorns a Barranquilla park that bears the same name was not a good idea, because the romantic and sexual encounters of the lovers in that scene earned him the remix of the ‘Santo cachón’.

“It was a space of infidelities,” he said the last time he walked through Bucaramanga, in December 2018 in a meeting rarely seen and heard in these lands staged in a room of the Union Club, where other legendary ones such as Fernando Meneses were also present. Wilfran Castillo.

But Ramiro Colmenares, accordionist of Los Embajadores Vallenatos who from the capital of Santander with another guajiro, Róbinson Damián, gave color to the funny song, still appreciates the opportunity to play that piazo ‘of song because it was a leap to fame, the passport to cross borders that at that time few had achieved, not even those born in the world capital of vallenato. He was one of those shocked by the death of this minstrel.

There is another who, wrapped in a ruana, mired in nostalgia and the haze of memories, the doctor Fernando Meneses, evokes his friend gone from his home on the cold outskirts of Bucaramanga.

“About ten days ago I spoke with him, he told me that he was finishing an extensive work on his 50 years of musical life, that he brought about 26 singers with rancheras, vallenato, everything, that only needed a few voices to put in. From Alfredo Gutiérrez, Silvestre, llaneros, popular music ”. They chatted on the balcony of dreams near the guitar of the moments of love that the flintstones of Barichara carved for their garden.

Romualdo left, but the Indio choir will always resound, the musical protest that put him in the eye of the hurricane because he manifested the eternal discontent of his people in the voice of Diomedes Díaz and the accordion of Colacho Mendoza:

“Compadre I am the Indian, compadre I am the Indian who has everything and has nothing,

I work for my children, I work for my children, I burn coal and fish on the beach.

I am the Guajiro Indian, from my ungrateful Colombian homeland

They have everything from the Indian, but they don’t give him anything …

There are no schools for study, no hospital for the sick,

We still ride donkeys and rowing boats …

And then what is the pod, what is the matter with our people

That the government does not give anything and they censor us for what we do

Even if they give us a bad name with their lying newspapers … ”