2023-07-24 06:08:42
The country, which at times no longer seems to have a threshold of surprise regarding the scandals of the different governments, was shaken last week by an unprecedented case.
Esteban Zabala Ramírez, Vice Minister of Creativity —this is what the position in the Ministry of Culture is called— was asked to resign after the Casa Macondo portal revealed that he had lied in his resume before the public service because he included a master’s degree in Development Management that he had not completed. And even more serious, he falsified documents from the Externado University to support that false diploma.
Immediately, important figures of culture appeared again. The theater director Fabio Rubiano, the actress Marcela Valencia and the former truth commissioner Lucía González, among others, published a new letter this weekend on their social media accounts, addressed to President Gustavo Petro, seriously questioning the management of culture during his government.
“We regret that the situation of the Ministry of Culture continues to deteriorate in a shameful way while the thousands of leaders, managers, artists, and cultural workers continue to wait for the response that you promised us on May 25 when we attended a meeting with you at the Casa de Nariño,” they wrote.
Even the actor Julián Román, who was one of the cornerstones of Petro’s campaign for the Presidency from social networks, began to publish sarcastic messages against Petro in recent days. To a question on Twitter about “What would a Petrista Barbie be like?” Román, who has close to 2 million followers on this social network, replied: “It would be a Barbie that would ignore any issue related to culture!”
And it is that President Petro has not paid more attention to the artists and cultural managers who have vehemently claimed him. The letter is not the first. In mid-May, 725 cultural figures sent him another letter signed, among others, by thoroughbred petristas such as the actresses Margarita Rosa de Francisco and Vicky Hernández, the singers Adriana Lucía and Andrea Echeverri, the actors Fabio Rubiano and Santiago Alarcón, as well as the writer Pilar Quintana, the pianist Teresita Gómez — the same one who calmed down the spirits while waiting for the sword of Bolí var—and film director Laura Mora.
In response to the letter, Petro received 35 of the signatories at the Casa de Nariño at the end of May. He listened to them for three hours, but did nothing. At least that’s what they complain about in the new letter: “We have not only awaited a response to the multiple letters we sent you, but also the immediate election of a new minister or minister.” In that meeting they had told the President in different ways that Jorge Zorro was not the one.
Petro himself, consulted at the time for the requests of the artists, gave vague answers. “It is that they are diverse expressions of art, that a person does not have all of them. A minister may fit in here or there, but not in everything. You have to try a Ministry that can develop the arts, ”he said in an interview with José Manuel Acevedo, from Noticias RCN.
In the new letter, the artists insisted on Petro in the plea: “You cannot allow any portfolio to be founded on lies and corruption (…) the task must be to find a suitable and correct minister”.
What is Zorro’s problem?
Why do artists and culture agents have so many reservations with Minister Jorge Zorro? In the letter they pointed out: “it publishes misleading figures and plans”, “it launches projects that are not well formulated”, “it makes promises in the territories and regions without clear criteria and effective follow-up” and “it proposes spaces for participation to later do what the Ministry officials capriciously want to do”. And regarding Zorro’s response to the vice minister’s fraud, they criticize that “with a cynical statement he hides this and other excesses that we have witnessed these months in the Ministry.”
Jorge Eduardo Zorro is a 77-year-old man whose great contact with culture has been through music, preferably classical. He did his undergraduate at the Moscow Conservatory —during the years of the Soviet Union—.
At the time, when the minister Patricia Ariza left to give way to Zorro, it was said that he had achieved that position for having been the teacher of the daughters of Gustavo Petro and Verónica Alcocer in the musical school that he himself created in 1998, in Bogotá.
Zorro explained that he did know Petro’s children, because they were at school but he was not their teacher. What he did admit was that there he met the president and Verónica Alcocer.
The Minister of Culture has been accused of assuming homophobic attitudes. At least that is how it was recorded in the resignation letter of the former communications leader for the ministry, Daniel José Téllez. “The minister (e) told me that very possibly the reasons why they did not accept me were related to my orientation and open manifestation as a homosexual man,” reads a statement published by Téllez following his resignation. And even, according to Ministry sources, they have also heard racist comments from him.
Petro keeps the minister
Gustavo Petro has always been a stubborn man, however in a case like this, in which 725 cultural figures have been begging him to change the minister, the questions about Zorro’s permanence are greater.
One reason may be the answer that Petro himself gave at the time: “You have to try a Ministry that can develop the arts.” That phrase has been interpreted as President Gustavo Petro’s desire to import the “orchestra system” model from Venezuela —he mentioned it in his inauguration speech—, and for this he would believe that Zorro is the one.
In fact, the trip that the then Vice Minister Zorro made, on January 31, with First Lady Verónica Alcocer, bypassing Minister Patricia Ariza to meet with the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and review the orchestra system in Caracas, is an indication of this.
In the photo published by Maduro on his Instagram, Zorro appears — in addition to Alcocer — with his ex-wife Pilar Leyva Durán and her sister Inés, both sisters of Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva. An obvious combination of family and work.
As explained by one of the most renowned specialists in music and researcher at the Pensar Institute, Oscar Andrés Hernández, the matter of the Venezuelan orchestra system fell like a bucket of cold water. In his analysis published in La Silla Vacía, he explains that although “the ‘system (of orchestras)’, supported by a large propaganda apparatus, has been presented as a benchmark for success in cultural management (…) many studies, including reports from the IDB, which was one of its major financiers, have begun to show that so much beauty did not conform to reality and that it had a very dark side.”
Perhaps what he is referring to is that it would be a bet more of political propaganda than cultural. It should be remembered that when Petro, as mayor of Bogotá, replicated the scheme of the Health Mission of Venezuela, which he named health in his home, he used it to distribute propaganda in Bogota.
Hernández, as a music scholar, argues that there is a deep contradiction in the fact that Zorro is the one who rules the culture in a government like Petro’s. Zorro, says Hernández, “throughout his career he has been convinced of the aesthetic and cultural supremacy of European classical music and its pedagogical forms.”
Also in Crafts and RTVC
Of course, the questions about the failures in the management of culture do not fall only on the minister. The first thing the government did, before Zorro, was to try to remove incentives from the cultural sector with the tax reform. But the culture sector managed to knock down most of them.
And Petro’s other appointments in the cultural sector have been no less controversial: that of Adriana Mejía Aguado, in Artesanías de Colombia, and that of Holman Morris, in an address at RTVC. The first has been “legal advisor to the Petro Alcocer family”, as she says in her biography on the Artesanías website. And the second, has been involved in controversies over complaints against him for harassment and domestic violence.
All this occurs while the Ministry of Culture has the largest budget in its history: 770,000 million pesos.
In the May letter, the artists and cultural managers told President Petro: “We are certain that you will listen to us, that we will not remain like the colonels of old wars that never received a response from the government. Hopefully sooner rather than later he will have the time to go to the port to check his mail, to read our letter and respond to the request that we are now making of him”.
It was a clear reference to the novel The Colonel has no one to write to him. The authors of the letter undoubtedly hope that the culture has a better ending than that of the protagonist of the book by Gabriel García Márquez.
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