Diomedes Díaz, the mirror of a Colombia that has not changed at all

Diomedes Díaz, in an image from the documentary 'Diomedes: the idol, the mystery and the tragedy'.Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

The voice of Diomedes Díaz has never stopped sounding in Colombia.

The icon of vallenato died in 2013, but his songs are still here, on the radio of a taxi, on the speakers of a dilapidated bus, in a neighborhood store, in the last hours of a house party, in the verbena of a town.

On Spotify, on YouTube, on cassettes or LPs.

Diomedes Díaz died, but his music is not forgotten, nor is Doris Adriana Niño, the woman who left his house on a date with him and never returned.

The crowd musician and the victimizer.

, the first Netflix documentary made in Colombia reviews the life of a man who was at the peak of success due to his talent and ended up in decline, almost like a caricature of the effects of a life of excess

It is not the first time that the story of Diomedes Díaz has been brought to the screen, but it is the first time that it has been shown with all its lights and shadows.

It is not a tribute to the artist, although in the first minutes it may seem so, it is rather the portrait of a man that reflects a moment in the history of Colombia and much of what this country still is.

“[This documentary] is an exercise in memory to question ourselves, to see ourselves, to understand what country we live in, Diomedes is the perfect character to explain us as a society,” Jorge Barbosa, one of the directors, says via Zoom.

The life of the composer and singer, who died at the age of 56, went through politics, football and defied justice.

He was the artist to whom everything was forgiven and he was in everything.

“He was overwhelmed by his presence on stage.

Diomedes made himself feel like everyone's compadre,

he sang to the peasant, to love, to heartbreak, to the party, to the country, to the cyclists and to himself.

If you wanted a sung biography of Diomedes, it would be enough to listen to some of his compositions”, says Juan Pablo Gómez Orozco, journalist and follower of the singer.

Diomedes Díaz was received like a god.

It was a myth.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – say his friends in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho man in everyone.

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

to the party, to the country, to the cyclists and to himself.

If you wanted a sung biography of Diomedes, it would be enough to listen to some of his compositions”, says Juan Pablo Gómez Orozco, journalist and follower of the singer.

Diomedes Díaz was received like a god.

It was a myth.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – say his friends in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all .

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

to the party, to the country, to the cyclists and to himself.

If you wanted a sung biography of Diomedes, it would be enough to listen to some of his compositions”, says Juan Pablo Gómez Orozco, journalist and follower of the singer.

Diomedes Díaz was received like a god.

It was a myth.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – say his friends in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all .

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

it would be enough to listen to some of his compositions”, says Juan Pablo Gómez Orozco, journalist and follower of the singer.

Diomedes Díaz was received like a god.

It was a myth.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – his friends say in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

it would be enough to listen to some of his compositions”, says Juan Pablo Gómez Orozco, journalist and follower of the singer.

Diomedes Díaz was received like a god.

It was a myth.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – his friends say in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – say his friends in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all.

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

He was the singer from a town in the Colombian Caribbean who brought vallenato to Madison Square Garden in New York and filled it.

He was the first Colombian musician – say his friends in the documentary – to receive a million dollars for a presentation, he was the artist coveted by drug traffickers, the one who had a diamond in his tooth and was also the most popular macho of all.

"How can we not take care of women if they are the ones who wash, the ones who cook, how can we not love them," he said.

It was the figure that everyone wanted to be with.

In 1994 he climbed onto a stage at the Metropolitan Stadium in Barranquilla for Ernesto Samper's closing campaign.

By then,

, as he was called, was already a national star and his support for Samper guaranteed the presidential candidate a photo to remember.

Whether they were for the musician or the politician did not matter, Samper, who ended up winning those elections, managed to summon thousands of people.

That same year, when the World Cup was held in the United States, Diomedes scored another great goal.

Together with his inseparable accordion player, Juancho Rois broke records with the song

(Sony, 1994), which became the soundtrack of Francisco

Maturana, with a luxury painting with figures such as

Valderrama, Óscar Córdoba, Freddy Rincón, Faustino Asprilla.

28 years have passed and Colombia has not forgotten that song, nor that selection, the 5-0 against Argentina and also the one that lost one of its defenders after the murder of Andrés Escobar by an own goal.

The

of

was released with more than 150,000 copies sold and almost 500,000 ordered by music stores.

Diomedes Díaz was at the top, despite the controversies of his life that everyone already knew: he offered private concerts to drug lords, he was once hired by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers –of the Cali cartel– and by Pablo Escobar, he did not know how many childrens had.

35?

more than 50?

His fame as a womanizer was celebrated.

No scandal harmed his musical career, not even the murder of Doris Adriana Niño, a 27-year-old woman with whom he occasionally saw and who disappeared after one of the meetings with the composer.

reconstructs with witnesses, journalists and the authorities of that time what happened after the night of May 14, 1997, when the woman entered the house of Diomedes Díaz and her body appeared hours later in a vacant lot, about two hours from Bogotá .

The singer always denied any responsibility in the death of his friend.

The version that his death had been the product of an overdose convinced the authorities at the beginning of the process, who later found him guilty.

“This exercise [the documentary] allows the audience to look back without putting a [single] point of view in front of it.

We are not trying to say if [Diomedes] was good or bad,” says Jorge Durán, another of the directors of the documentary, who makes a detailed record of the judicial process that ended with the capture of the singer.

Doris Adriana was drugged, tortured and suffocated to death and Diomedes Díaz only spent 32 months in jail.

The documentary collects the voices of Doris Adriana Niño's family and the search for justice, of the men who surrounded the musician and of the fans who did not believe that he had committed a crime or that they did not care about the artist's personal life.

Colombia is still very similar to that country that celebrated Diomedes: drug trafficking, violence and machismo are still here, every day, but the laws of today, with femicide classified as a crime in the Penal Code and a feminist movement that demands justice would have questioned –and perhaps prevented– that a man accused of murdering a woman could continue to lead the life of an artist in freedom.

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