Julio César Uribe Hermocillo
By Julio César Uribe Hermocillo. . . . Taken from El Guarenguie.
On election Sundays, the so-called Quibdó School District was something like Corferias in Bogotá. For more than twenty-five years and until a little more than three decades ago, the Barrio Escolar was the only voting station in Quibdó, and where all the tables where you could vote for any of the elections were installed. The original building, which we are talking about, was located in front of the old Chocó Police Command and – like this one – occupied the entire long block of 29th Street from the first race to the third race, in the Barrio Cristo. King.
The now non-existent School District was a concentration of public primary schools, distributed in two blocks built between November 1941 and mid-1943, with Dionisio Echeverry Ferrer being the National Mayor of Chocó, and in response to the increase in the city’s school population. . An increase that, congratulations, had occurred thanks to the expansion of public education coverage to all sectors of local and regional society, decreed in the previous period of government, when the National Mayor was Adán Arriaga Andrade y Echeverry Ferrer He held the position of Director of Public Education.
The original building was built by the Claretian religious Vicente Galicia, popularly known in the city as Brother Galicia, who was also in charge of the construction of the Convent, the Cathedral and the Carrasquilla School, among other works. It was frequently praised for the quality and functionality of its design, “for its adequate insertion into the urban environment” and for being “perhaps the best example of how architecture should be worked on the street in an environment like Quibdó.” ; as expressed by the architect and historian Luis Fernando González Escobar, in his now classic study on the history of Quibdó based on its urban development and its architectural heritage in the first half of the 20th century.[1].
One of the memorable attributes of the building was the long and wide corridor that ran from Carrera Primera to Carrera Tercera, and in which more than half of Quibdó took shelter at some point to protect themselves from the water or the sun. Regarding this construction component, González Escobar noted: «The gallery, with a perimeter colonnade… is an urban gesture of respect for the pedestrian in the face of such extreme weather conditions: either a lot of heat or intense rain, which can be mitigated there in the absence of the eaves or the gallery in other sectors»[2]. Adapted to the climate of Quibdos, with rooms and cloisters of generous amplitude, projected towards the public space, the building with which the School District was founded was demolished a few years ago to make way for a gigantic replacement building, one of those that are now known like mega schools.
Precisely, the spaciousness of its spaces, both in classrooms and offices, as well as in hallways, cloisters, patios and recreation areas, allowed for so many years that all the voting tables that were installed in Quibdó for each election could fit there. On its white-painted walls, there was plenty of room for those motley lists of citizenship card numbers, where citizens could consult the number of their voting stations; in those times – more recent than it seems – without a computer, or applications, or internet, or anything other than typewriters and the officials of the Registry, who took care of all matters on election Sundays.
The generosity of the spaces in the School District was such that it was even enough for the infamous practice – inaugurated in the early 1980s – of leaving abandoned in the gallery of the building a few old people who had been taken out of school early in the morning. Quibdó Parish Elderly, in the distant Nicolás Medrano neighborhood, to bring them to vote. Once this was completed, they were seated on a platform or in a hallway, so that they could eat a rice cake, as lunch and compensation, while the stair bus or the SUV arrived again that would return them to their place… Some of them ended up staying there. , left by the electoral captains of the political movements, abandoned to their fate, confused and misplaced, until some charitable soul took pity on them and somehow returned them to their Elderly. On more than one occasion, we had to look for two or three of these voters who were constrained in the nearby streets, as they had gone walking, with their precarious canes – sometimes a simple broomstick – in search of whoever was their old home in one of the central neighborhoods of the city.
The next day after the elections, while people in their homes continued rehearsing methods to remove the indelible ink that identified them as voters from their right index finger; The perimeter and the surrounding areas of the School Neighborhood dawned covered with electoral material scattered on the scarce pavement, the gravel, the dust and the puddles of the precarious streets of yesterday. The votes were tiny envelopes, like tiny letter envelopes, made of newspaper, the size of today’s debit or credit card, inside which the voting ballots were packed, one, two or three depending on the election, printed in black and white, and sometimes in pale blue or faint red, in simple typography, without photos or decorations, with nothing more than the name of the candidate and his party, without numbers or logos, without slogans or boxes. Everything was simple, cool and cute, like knowing that there were two matches and from time to time three or even four movements, no more than that.
Until well into the 1980s, after the polls closed on Election Sunday, Chocó’s election results were reported complete within two or three days. Quibdó, the epicenter of the region in all respects, was where there were the most telephones and where the prominent candidates of the two parties that existed until then had access to radio telephones, telex and telegraphs from the state telecommunications company, Telecom. At the regional headquarters of the Registry, work was carried out until it was necessary to complete all the data. And bulletins were issued, of course, although without the display of current affairs. And the night progressed and dawn arrived and some consolidated data was almost confirmed.
But, on the third day, it was not unusual for two or three dozen votes to appear, coming from some village in Baudó or San Juan below or Bajo Atrato, sometimes from Darién, or ten or fifteen votes from some unknown village of those. Not even the teachers of the School District knew of its existence, nor the clarinetists who, from party to party, with their shawms, toured Chocó throughout the year. Such developments could easily change the results taken for granted until that moment in the offices of the Registry or in the headquarters of the political parties, in Quibdó.
Still, as in so many other regions of the country where instead of roads and paths there were rivers and streams, the elections came to fruition. And the candidates of that time, in general, accepted the results, despite the doubts that these untimely votes raised; especially when this involved accidental shipwrecks of boats or canoes in which the voting records and the ballot boxes with the votes were transported at night or in the early morning.
First Race of Quibdó, southern end, during the reconstruction of the city after the fire of 1966. PHOTO: Photographic and film archive of Chocó.
Many people from old Quibdó, who voted throughout their entire life as citizens in the Barrio Escolar, never knew for sure if the final results of the elections in Chocó at that time were defined, in addition to the voters, by the party leader of a Johnson outboard motor, the broken lever of an overhauled boat or the hull of a boarded-up banana boat in the darkness of the night in the midst of the roar of a storm. Most of these people went to their graves with uncertainty. And the School District, with its columns that enchanted the children who hid behind them, also disappeared forever.
[1] Gonzalez Escobar, Luis Fernando. Quibdó, historical context, urban development and architectural heritage. National University of Colombia publication center Medellin Headquarters, February 2003. 362 pp. P. 310-3
[2] Ibidem. P. 311.