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Before then-president Álvaro Uribe included her in his shortlist to choose the nation’s Attorney General in 2009, very few in Bogotá knew who Margarita Cabello Blanco was. Daughter of the lawyer from Villanueva, Guajira, Leandro Cabello and from the Barranquilla María Concepción Blanco, her childhood was spent more in her father’s town, listening to stories of old men who came from the desert and vallenatos blown by the wind. Villanueva, in the south of the department, is the cradle of vallenato folklore from where many of the greats came from: the Zuleta brothers, Jorge Celedón and Israel Romero, founder of the Binomio de Oro.
When he visited his grandfather, at the beginning of the seventies, Julio Enrique Blanco, one of the founders of the Universidad del Atlántico, played with some German books that he left on the floor of the library, old books by Kant, Hegel and the entire circle of Vienna that he read and studied in their original language. Although she had one of the philosophers of the Coast as a grandfather, Margarita Cabello was never a good student. She began to study primary school at the Colegio de la Enseñanza and later entered the Colegio Lourdes.
Being a lawyer was like having a gift. Since she was little, while her friends from the El Prado neighborhood gathered to play Lleva or Yerbis, she stayed on the large terrace of her father’s house to play court. She had a devastating verb and her friends, seeing that she was an adult locked in the body of a girl, gave her the nickname that even some of her closest acquaintances know her by: Canitas.
However, childhood in that old house on Carrera 52 and Calle 74 was not easy. One of her four brothers, Beatriz Cecilia, began to develop schizophrenia that would end up leaving her in a mental hospital. When Margarita was preparing for her 15-year party, her mother María Concepción died suddenly.
He wanted his pain to go away with the study. He went to the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. She stayed at the house of her sister María Elvira -who would later be consul in Caracas and second line of former senator Mauricio Pimiento, convicted of parapolitics- in Teusaquillo, when the first semester ended she went to Barranquilla to spend year-end vacations and. there she met the young engineer Rafael Caparroso. The love was so tempetuous, so monopolizing, that she left the Rosary and enrolled in the CUC, University Corporation of the Coast. With Caparroso she had three children until they separated in the mid-1990s.
In Barranquilla he trained and got his first job as a clerk in a court in Barranquilla. Later she would become a Criminal Judge in Sabanalarga, Magistrate of the Superior Court of Barranquilla, postgraduate teacher. But not only the study helped her to overcome the break with her husband. She found great support in the liberal politician David Name, and it was precisely who introduced her into the closed world, otherwise very masculine, of the Masons. She joined the Masonic Lodge of which she has been a member since 1998.
Her first job was as a clerk in a court in Barranquilla, the city where she trained as a lawyer.
At the same time he met who years later would become a solicitor: Alejandro Ordóñez. From this relationship, she would be appointed in April 2009 as Delegate Attorney for Surveillance and it was the same Attorney who recommended her to Uribe so that he could integrate her into the shortlist that he presented for the Prosecutor’s Office at the end of that year, just when the eight years of his two terms of government. But precisely the closeness with Ordóñez and Uribe ended up harming her in Court in her claims to be appointed prosecutor.
Being close to President Uribe led her to make a mistake that could have been costly: she accompanied Uribe’s legal secretary, Edmundo del Castillo, to visit the magistrate of the Court Nelson Pinilla in search of support for the third reelection. Hair was scarred. However, eight years later it was a productive planting and President Duque invited her to join his cabinet as Minister of Justice and later included her in the shortlist for the Attorney General’s Office.
She also came to the ministry at a time of crisis that caused the departure of Gloria María Borrero, but with new credentials: in 2012 she had been elected a magistrate of the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice and later president of the Corporation. The circumstances were given to be the first woman to reach the Attorney General of the nation.
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