"It would be wrong to say good afternoon to them. Once again, Colombia is filled with shame." With those remembered words, Félix de Bedout, then presenter of NTC Noticias, opened the broadcast of July 2, 1994, a tragic date marked in the memory of the country. "Andrés Escobar, a player of the Colombian National Team, was cowardly murdered in Medellín. Twelve shots took the life of a man who gave himself up to represent the country with dignity," the journalist continued. The defender was shot by drug traffickers outside a nightclub while the World Cup was still being played in the United States, in which he had scored an own goal that his killers viciously reproached him for.
Not even the most beloved and admired athletes have been spared from the multiple forms of violence that Colombia seeks to leave behind. This is how he took it upon himself to remember, once again, the kidnapping in La Guajira of the father of Luis Díaz, the English Liverpool star. Last Sunday, after scoring the equaliser against Luton Town in the Premier League, the striker's poignant message on his shirt went around the world: "Freedom for Dad."
His captors, ELN guerrillas, released Mane Diaz on Thursday after 12 days, amid renewed calls for a commitment to end the practice as part of peace talks with the government. The country breathed a sigh of relief even in the midst of unrest. The analyst and writer León Valencia, who belonged to the guerrillas in his youth, summed it up in a few words: "The ELN came up with the idea of carrying out the crime most hated by Colombian society against the most beloved player in the country in order to throw national and international opinion on it." Their drama struck a chord, and it will be fresh when Colombia play their qualifier against Brazil next week.
Lucho Díaz is not the only player of the national team, nicknamed "everyone's team", who has suffered violence firsthand. Juan Guillermo Cuadrado, at the age of four, hid under his bed when he heard a gunfire in Necoclí, a place besieged by paramilitaries, and when he came out he learned that his father had been murdered. Juan Fernando Quintero, who grew up in a poor neighborhood of Medellín, also lost his father, who disappeared when he was two years old while serving in the military, an episode that the Army has never clarified. Many other footballers come from remote regions suffering the rigors of an armed conflict of more than half a century.
In cycling, the other great national sport, there are also painful examples such as that of Rigoberto Urán, whose life inspires a television series. His father was killed by paramilitaries in his native Urrao when he went for a bike ride. Lucho Herrera, the first Colombian champion of the Vuelta a España, in 1987, celebrated that title with an emotional phrase in another convulsive moment: "I just want there to be peace in Colombia." Already retired from professional sports, he was kidnapped for 24 hours by guerrillas of the extinct FARC who intercepted him near his farm in Fusagasugá in 2000. Miguel Ángel López earned his nickname Superman for resisting in his early days to give his bicycle to robbers and confront them, which earned him two stab wounds in the leg. And already in the field of nicknames, Fernando Gaviria, a powerful packer in the midst of the reputed beetles, has asked not to be called El Misil, since it is a word associated with war in a society that yearns for peace.
In a country with more than eight million victims, it seems inevitable that many of its athletes have had to go through the same horror. "The murder of Andrés Escobar is proof that in Colombia killing is anything: it is not taking life but breaking through," says writer Ricardo Silva Romero, who addressed the tragic murder of the defender in his novel Autogol. "On the other hand, I've always found it chilling that we ask athletes to prove to the world that we're not all violent. No, we are not trying to defeat violence, but we are demanding that people who break their souls in the mountains or on the courts win to make it clear that here we also have courage and here we are also hardworking, decent."
Mane Díaz has a soccer school in Barrancas, his hometown, where they idolize, of course, his soccer son. "Of course, we are hurt by the kidnapping of Lucho Díaz's father, especially because Lucho Díaz is a survivor and a man who escapes Colombian misery, and the father is a guy who brings up children who want to play, but he also reminds us that this doesn't work," Silva Romero reflects. "We think so because cities develop and a certain part of the population progresses. But the truth is that this war continues and the proof is that the degradation continues," he laments.
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