In one of the songs from the album ‘El mundo’, which he recorded with Colacho Mendoza, the vallenato singer Diomedes Diaz sent greetings to former FARC guerrilla Ricardo Palmera, nicknamed Simón Trinidad.
It is about the song that bears the same name from the album: “If everyone in the world were capitalists/ listen, who would work./ If in the world we were all poor people/ gentlemen, it wouldn’t work either/ That’s why the world to be a world/ There must be a little bit of everything/ The accommodated is needed/ It takes the poor and the rich/”.
Right after the chorus, the song has a phrase dedicated to the economist Juvenal Ovidio Ricardo Palmera Pineda, who was a member of one of the families of the Valledupar elite and worked as manager of the city’s Banco del Comercio: “And that is why we love Ricardo Palmera so much, he is the same example…“.
According to historical data, Palmera studied economics at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá, and upon returning to Valledupar he worked at the Agrarian Fund of Cesarthe Popular University of Cesar and the Banco del Comercio, for which he became one of the most respected professionals in the city.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he began to sympathize with left-wing ideas. He was part of the Patriotic Union (UP), a political party formed in 1984 that suffered a violent extermination. But, in 1987, Palmera Pineda joined the Farc-EP, and there he adopted the alias Simón Trinidad in honor of Simón Bolívar.
Simón Trinidad is currently in the United States paying a sentence.