Senator Domingo López Escauriaza, pioneer with his brothers Guillermo and Luis Carlos, El Tuerto López, of journalism in Cartagena, fulfilled the dream together with Eduardo Ferrer of creating the newspaper El Universal, whose first edition was published on March 8, 1948. They had already undertaken many adventures in Cartagena, such as La Unión Comercial, which was bilingual. The poet wrote there and translated into English. And then, El diario de la Costa. It may interest you: Tatis tells you: the history of Compressed, the smallest newspaper in the world
Senator Domingo López Escauriaza, of deep liberal convictions, was a personal friend of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and in turn, editor-in-chief Clemente Manuel Zabala, from San Jacinto, had accompanied him on his journey through the Magdalena Grande in his search for Testimonial with victims of the Bananeras Massacre in 1928.
The life of Colombia would change the following month with the death of Gaitán, on April 9, 1948. Exactly one month and one day after the appearance of El Universal.
Below are the milestones of seven decades of history:
– El Universal recounted in its pages the day in October 1951 when the dismantling of the rails of the railroad from Cartagena to Calamar began, which for 56 years connected eleven stations and launched the commercial and business development of the regions.
– In 1954 the participation of the Cartagena artists Enrique Grau, Cecilia Porras and Nereo López in the first short film La langosta azul, directed by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio.
– In 1963 the editor-in-chief Clemente Manuel Zabala was found dead in his room on Calle del Arzobispado.
– In 1967 the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was published. The director sends the writer a letter recalling his time at El Universal.
– The director Domingo López Escauriaza died in 1981. Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. El Universal published special pages about his beginnings. Picking up the receiver of his telephone one morning in April 1983, the editor-in-chief of El Universal, Ángel Romero, listened to the conversation of two people close to Jaime Bateman Cayón, maximum commander of the M-19 guerilla movement, in which they commented on his possible death in a plane crash in the jungles of the Panamanian Darién. He tracked down the news and revealed in detail the world’s scoop on Bateman’s death.
-El Universal dedicated pages about the seizure of the Palace of Justice, on November 6 and 7, 1985, at the hands of the M-19 guerrilla movement, where more than a hundred people died, among them, 11 of the 24 magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice, and more than a dozen people were disappeared.
– On July 1, 1986, Pope Juan Pablo Segundo came to Cartagena and officiated a mass in Chambacú. The dances of Delia Zapata Olivella were presented. The power went out.
– At the beginning of 1989, the leader of the New Liberalism, Luis Carlos Galán, visited the newspaper El Universal and gave an interview. In the middle of the presidential campaign on the night of August 18, 1989, he was shot dead in Soacha.
– In 1992, a 12-year-old girl came to the headquarters of the newspaper El Universal holding her father’s hand and said she wanted to sing at the Cartagena Convention Center. She was Skakira.
– In that same 1992, the French ship Melquiades arrived in Cartagena, celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in America. The journalist who went to write the story found García Márquez inside the boat and gave an interview to El Universal.
– The best cultural work of 1992, winner of the Simón Bolívar Prize, was won by a series of reports to writers published in the El Universal magazine. Read: El Universal, awarded the Simón Bolívar National Journalism Award
– The newspaper El Universal published in 1995 the book A bouquet of forget-me-nots by Gustavo Arango, which covers García Márquez’s time at El Universal.
– On January 13, 1995, flight HK 3839 with 52 passengers headed for San Andrés, crashed in Marialaba at 7:40 p.m., and only a 9-year-old girl survived: Erika Delgado Gómez, who was rescued by a farmer in the swamp. She only broke her arm. El Universal did the report and discovered that parts of the plane and even the black box were in the houses of the peasants and fishermen in the neighborhood.
– On September 11, 2001, in an unprecedented terrorist attack in the United States, at 8:45 am, American Airline Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, and fifteen minutes later, a second United Airline plane crashed into the south tower. The third and fourth planes hit the Pentagon. 3,062 people died. The perpetrators of the attack were Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. This tragic event with which the 21st century began marked world politics forever. El Universal headlined: Horror! In a special evening edition, led by Germán Mendoza Diago, editor-in-chief.
– On April 2, 2005, Pope John Paul II died.
– On May 10, 2006, abortion was decriminalized in Colombia.
To summarize, so far in the 21st century, The universal It has been a portrait of Cartagena in its lights and shadows. And also a mirror of the nation with its turbulence, blunders and successes. The newspaper has been a fruitful school for great storytellers, journalists and writers from Cartagena and Colombia for 75 years. Gabriel García Márquez, Héctor Rojas Herazo, Clemente Manuel Zabala, Gustavo Ibarra Merlano, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Antonio J. Olier have passed through here. Ramiro de la Espriella, Aníbal Esquivia Vásquez, Germán Mendoza Diago, Felipe Santiago Colorado, Alberto Sierra, Jorge García Usta, Alberto Salcedo Ramos, Gustavo Arango, David Lara Ramos, John Jairo Junieles, Margarita García Robayo, Rubén Darío Álvarez, Orlando Echeverri Benedetti , to name a few from a long family of creators. History flows and will continue to happen because El Universal is part of that story that we wanted to share from the bird’s eye view.
