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Argentine Folk Icon Facundo Cabral Killed in Guatemala



A spokesman for the Guatemalan president’s office said that the 74-year-old Cabral, who had been in the country for a week, was killed by gunfire and that his security team was unable to fend off the attack

[July 9, 2011]

GUATEMALA CITY – Argentine folk singer and poet Facundo Cabral, an iconic figure known for his protest songs, social commitment and spiritual reflections, was gunned down Saturday by assailants while riding with his promoter from his hotel to the Guatemala City airport.

The spokesman for the Guatemalan president’s office, Ronaldo Robles, said that the 74-year-old Cabral, who had been in the country for a week, was killed by gunfire and that his security team was unable to fend off the attack.

“It was a direct attack against him by assailants wielding assault rifles,” Robles said.

The spokesman said Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom is “distraught over this cowardly act” and has assigned three specialized investigative teams to solve the murder.

The singer’s concert promoter, Henry Fariña, also was seriously wounded in the attack and is listed in critical condition at a hospital in the Guatemalan capital.

Local media, citing eyewitnesses, reported that the gunmen traveling in two late-model vehicles tried to halt Cabral’s automobile and became engaged in a gun battle with members of the singer’s security detail.

In fleeing the attack, the driver of the vehicle in which Cabral was riding ended up parked outside a fire station.

Author of the internationally famous hit “No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla” (I’m Not from Here nor There), Cabral gave two concerts before hundreds of fans during his fateful last trip to Guatemala, one in Guatemala City and the last one Friday night in the western city of Quetzaltenango.



Cabral, who began singing at the age of eight, was born into a poor family in La Plata, a city in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires, on May 22, 1937.

He said in interviews that at the age of nine he stopped the official vehicle of then-President Juan Domingo Peron and his wife, Evita, to ask for work for his mother, Sara.

That led to his family moving to the city of Tandil, where Cabral worked as a farmworker and had his first exposure to folk music but also to alcohol and criminal activity.

After a stint in a reform school, Cabral had an encounter with a vagabond named Simon that would lead him to God and push him into a career in music.

A few years later, he moved to the tourist city of Mar del Plata, where the owner of a hotel gave him the chance to sing in public for the first time.

In 1970, he penned the song, “No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla” that brought him international fame.

Cabral, who talked frequently in public about Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, also expressed through his songs a message of social protest and that led to his fleeing his native Argentina in 1976, when a right-wing dictatorship took power, and continuing his musical career in Mexico.

He met the “love of his life” at the age of 40 in New York, a woman 20 years his junior who died along with their daughter a few years later in a plane crash.



Finding him depressed after the tragedy, Mother Teresa herself challenged Cabral to find another outlet for his love and that led him to make the trip to India to work with lepers at a home for people suffering from that illness in Calcutta.

He returned to Argentina in 1984, after the return to democracy, and continued to enjoy success as an artist, selling albums and filling theaters and stadiums.

Known for his countless anecdotes and intense work schedule, he had lived for many years at a hotel in Buenos Aires – nearly blind but never ceasing to create music and communicate his art.

Appointed by UNESCO as a Messenger of Peace and nominated a few years ago for a Nobel Peace Prize, Cabral had said he did not fear the type of violence that would eventually take his life.

“If you are filled with love you can’t have fear because love is courage. I grew up among violence ... later came the dictatorship, the abandonment of my father,” Cabral said last year in an interview in Mexico when asked if he was afraid of performing in a country with a widespread organized crime problem.

Condemnation of the killing poured in from across the region.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a leftist leader who often makes religious references during his diatribes against capitalism and U.S. foreign policy, expressed his condolences on Twitter.

“How painful! They killed the great troubadour of the Pampas! Long live Facundo Cabral!,” Chavez wrote.

Another prominent left-wing president in the region, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, said in his weekly Saturday address that the crime will only serve to immortalize Cabral as a singer-songwriter who was committed to the poor and critical of dictatorships in the Americas.

Copyright Latin American Herald Tribune - 2011 ©

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=405612&CategoryId=10718