Vallenato is recognized as Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and its exponents the greatest reference for the new generations. Talking about minstrels and masters of the genre is synonymous with respect for a folklore that identifies Colombia to the world.
In recent days, the attacks on great singers, such as the most recent one by the journalist Salud Hernández Mora against the ‘Cacique de La Junta’, Diomedes Díaz, has caused repudiation and in defense of his memory he went out of his way his daughter Lily Díaz, who asked the communicator for respect and consistency when referring to her father.
The journalist dedicated a column entitled: “Social sanction for Diomedes Díaz”, published on May 20 in Semana magazine.
But this fact, although it seems isolated in the professional behavior of Hernández Mora, shows that his pen leans towards an attack against vallenato, although its origins have nothing to do with Colombia.
For this reason, El País Vallenato refers to the embarrassing attack that Salud Hernández Mora also made against the teacher Rafael Escalona in 2013, under the same derogatory criteria that this time he used against Diomedes Díaz.
Relentlessly, the communication professional published in the newspaper El Tiempo a column titled “Que los Castren”, in which she makes a strong petition against the sexual abusers of minors.
But the curious thing about the case, and without any justifiable context, Salud Hernández ‘forcefully’ mentions the sideburn composer Rafael Escalona, among the humiliating and offensive lines that contained the opinion article.
“How do we allow 20 percent of adolescent pregnancies in rural areas to be due to incest? How do we laugh at a singer like Escalona because he was so macho that he left 29 recognized children in addition to who knows how many without giving them a last name? His infinite irresponsibility and his intolerable machismo should be a blur on his biography… ”, reads the column.
HER DAUGHTER DEFENDED WITH HER PEN
Faced with this unacceptable reference, Taryn Escalona, daughter of Rafael Escalona, responded to the journalist in the same way, with her pen, through a column published in the newspaper El Tiempo entitled: “Getting Escalona castrated?”
“On Sunday, January 27, Salud Hernández Mora exposed the blockbuster issue of sexual abusers, and had the unfortunate suddenness of “adorning” the issue by including, forced!, the name of Escalona.
But Hernández-Mora does not try to poison the memory of our Caribbean glory in any way, but rather, recurrently, questions its existence… Does the woman want Escalona to have been castrated, and with it… that my brothers and I had not been born? By the way, he proposes to eradicate it from our cultural history! He just ignores that all the children of Escalona are one, in defense of his memory, because he was an example and pride for us, and he taught us not to kneel before the greed of those who use our ways to magnify their own. Escalona never made an apology for crime, he was always a gentle, generous and educated vallenato who loved his children, his friends, loved life and his women -without shame in it- and never mistreated anyone, because he was a gentleman to the letter Cabal, who only committed unforgettable lyrics.
In common, my father and Salud have two books: Escalona is part of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hernández swells the pages of My Confession, Castaño Gil’s criminal blog,” wrote Taryn Escalona, also a social communicator.
This opinion column, in its time, was widely read in the Colombian Caribbean and in the interior of the country, generating comments in defense of maestro Rafael Escalona, extolling his legacy as the greatest minstrel that Vallenato music has produced.