By: Alejo Restrepo Mosquera.
This great territory called Chocó, bathed by two great seas, was initially explored by Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1501 and Martín Fernández de Enciso, who founded the first European city in the American continent and it was located in Chocoana territory, which was called Santa María la Antigua del Darién, destroyed shortly after by disputes between the European conquerors and the native Indians. On September 25, 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean and called it the South Sea.
The history of Chocó has always been inevitably subject to gold and platinum exploitation of its soil, as it is rich in alluvial gold and platinum mines, which has resulted in the use of these “riches” by numerous buccaneers. since before independence. This has ruined our indigenous and Afro-Colombian culture.
Said depredation, ancestrally, has been carried out by foreign merchants, initially in the mining enclaves and later with the dredgers for the industrial extraction of precious metals introduced by the Chocó Pacífico Mining Company, in the town of Andagoya, and lately with the backhoes and dredges, the which in their passage through Chocoano soil have only left the trail of indigence and incalculable ecological damage to the environment, this with the consent of our brand new environmental authorities.
At this time, our sad history is repeating itself, the national government once again resumes the sale of the Chocoano territory, granting mining titles to multinational companies and no one has spoken.
It is from there that in the year 1728 a slave named Barule, presumably a Prince descendant of an African Kingdom, leads the largest insurrection in Chocó together with the brothers Antonio and Mateo Mina, founding Palenque Tadó. This palenque was made up of 120 cimarrones. On February 18, 1728, they faced a bloody battle with the slavers and were defeated. Barule and the aforementioned Mina brothers were shot by Lieutenant TresPalacios Mier.
This confirms that since remote times in Chocó there has been combat against slavers, subjugators and exploiters of our wealth.
This is how it is good to refresh the memory of Chocoanos that in past times great debates were promoted in parliament against the Chocó-Pacífico mining company, for the merciless exploitation of precious metals in this department without any compensation.
In the fight for independence from the Spanish yoke, the Chocó made a great contribution to this great cause, among others the military control of the Atrato River, with the construction of a fort in Murrí on the banks of the Atrato River, to protect us from attacks by the Spanish troops. In this place the Iberian troops suffered one of the greatest and crushing defeats in March 1816, inflicted by the Chocoano patriots and soldiers Miguel Montalvo and Tomas Pérez.
After the separation of Colombia from Ecuador and Venezuela, Chocó initially became part of the sovereign State of Cauca, in the year 1908 it was a Department and in 1909 it returned to being a mayor, during this mayoral period relatively everything went well.
As of November 3, 1947, when we became a department again, the chaos in which we are immersed today began, due in part to the fact that our public administrations became politicized, and each year a governor was appointed, more as a product of the political compromises of the local caciques, that with people with the moral capacities and the vocation of service to govern the destinies of this department.
In these 75 years of departmental life, in the last four decades the most flagrant corruption and politicking that has ever been seen in this territory has been unleashed. You only get to these positions of responsibility and decision-making to share out the budget, due to the corrupting power of money to buy your children’s conscience, where each one goes for his own, some of these rulers have come out with the pockets full to live outside of Chocó, carrying out all kinds of tricks with the money of the Chocoanos, destined for investment in health, education, infrastructure works, recreation, basic sanitation, etc.
At the end of the road, most of these pseudo-rulers have almost always ended up being prosecuted, hated and stigmatized as manilargos.
This real moral decomposition in the Chocoan political direction has been the cause of the disappearance of the Liquor Company, the Chocó Lottery, the Department’s Provident Fund, the governor’s house, the fiscal houses, the soft drink factory, and Lately, the intervention of public entities such as the San Francisco de Asís Hospital, Dasalud, Departmental Education Secretary, not perceiving the material progress of this terroir of the homeland, which has made us the most backward department in Colombia.
Not to mention the municipalities of Chocó, they are a separate case; The last scarecrows that have been seen in our midst have been the embezzlement of health resources, where every day a fraudster is apprehended.
All the real estate built more than 60 years ago by the few good rulers who have passed through the public administration of Chocó, such as the Hotel de Turismo, the Cinco Pisos Building, and part of the eight-story building, have ended up in private hands.
This seems to be that the Chocoano people care little, since every four years they do not reflect and do not change their attitude to choose, it seems that only some are interested in buying their conscience, or giving them a small job, or a crumb of bureaucratic power, at the same time, it does not affect us at all that they classify us as the most corrupt at the national level, this associated with the unprecedented institutional crisis that we are currently experiencing, the only thing that remains for us to say is the lapidary phrase: ” God save the Chocó”.
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