From Despair to Glory,and Back: The Rags to Riches to Rags Story of Antonio Cervantes,Kid Pambelé

Born on December 23, 1945, in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free town of the Americas, Antonio Cervantes, aka Kid Pambelé, epitomizes the extreme nature of the marginalization of the population of African descent in Colombia. The arc of his career—from extreme poverty to immense wealth to dire indigence—evinces the extent to which social and cultural conditions inhibit sustained prosperity among Afro-Colombians, condemning them to structural poverty. Cervantes was the first Colombian boxing international champion, successfully defending his title 16 times while keeping it for almost eight years throughout the 1970s. At the time, his popularity was only comparable to that of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Yet, while growing up, he made a living as a shoeshine boy in the Caribbean port of Cartagena de Indias. By any standards, given the sizeable fortune made during his career, Cervantes should be enjoying a pleasant existence in his old age. Nonetheless, his story is one of martyrdom, sacrificed for the sake of a society unwilling to address underlying inequities and collective prejudice. Today, he survives on the generosity of a paltry state pension, following psychological breakdowns, and bouts of anxiety, rage, and depression.

In Colombia, Pambelé's story is viewed, first and foremost, as an extremely sad chapter in the history of national sports. However, the main point of my contention with respect to the boxer's career is not that he was the victim of racial discrimination, but the fact that his life story has not been examined critically, leading to a collective assessment of social responsibility. By and large, national perception of Pambelé's life revolves around his failure to build on success, as though Colombia were an emporium of individualism and social opportunity, and discounting anything the mores and values of Colombian society in the 1970s and 1980s may have had to do with his predicaments. Athletes and sports figures do not rise, perform, or fall in a void. In plain terms, I view Pambelé's life as an opportunity for national examination left unattended. To most Colombians, Pambelé's bad luck is the result of his mental disequilibrium and lack of restraint—even the boxer condones this reading, having internalized the general message of surrounding society despite his numerous relapses and occasional imbalances. In this sense, the story of Pambelé is highly representative of the degree of denial within Colombian society when it comes to racial inequity. On the whole, Pambelé's life has not led to a more open acknowledgment of racial disparities or even a growing awareness of the general responsibility in the ill-treatment of Afro-Colombians. Instead, his case is interpreted very individually as the result of his own mischief. But, is it not sensible to imagine his travails may have had something to do with the fact that he was the first Afro-Colombian to experience the limelight in such an exorbitant, uncontrolled fashion, amid a society clearly unprepared to assimilate and understand such a change? Pambelé's life did not take place in a vacuum, detached from the overall fabric of Colombian society and culture. Anyone arguing this would be clearly deluded.

The reflections of Ignacio Ellacuría, a key proponent of Latin American Liberation philosophy, may bring some light to Pambelé's experience. ¹ According to Ellacuría, human reality is the result of historical and social considerations: in concrete terms, the range of possibilities for the exercise of freedom of any given individual's life is the result of both past human actions and the society in which the individual lives (Samour, 1999, pp. 89–121). Ellacuría, a Basque committed to the liberation of Latin Americans, is interested in this aspect because, in the process of understanding liberation as a form of resistance, he recognizes in it a transformative nature, something which may allow people to interpret and transform their surroundings both materially and formally. So, it is not just the individual's actions that dictate the outcome of the exercise of freedom. Society plays an integral part in the realm of possibilities contemplated for any individual, as would be the case for Pambelé. For Ellacuría, freedom begins with the consideration of history. Yet, it is not the conventional idea of history—the academic discipline—that matters to him, but what he calls historical reality—that is to say, the conditions of reality that allow a formation of history—which he equates with a liberating function of an intrinsically political nature. In this sense, liberation involves new forms of reality.

To understand what may be perceived as reality, one must consider the circumstances of the society in which people live. In the quest to understand reality, history appears as an object of study, since it is conceived as the ultimate, distinct version of reality. That is why Ellacuría focuses on history, though as a milieu rather than content. In this milieu, the key consideration is how reality reveals itself within it. What Ellacuría argues is that it is through historical reality that people may create new versions of themselves. Unlike ideologization, which engenders an abstraction of historical reality, historicization situates ideological abstractions in a practical context, bringing into the open what the latter may conceal. Thus, history appears as a form of reality that may indeed affect reality, though not all reality in the same manner. History appears as possibility: the possibility to choose, which is intrinsic to all beings, and the realm of possibilities, which are the conditions that actually render things possible. That is where, following Xavier Zubiri, his Basque mentor, Ellacuría distinguishes between the future (that which may be, as it entails a real and present possibility) and the futureable (that which we may elucubrate about, given the inexistence of subjective or objective conditions for its realization). One may have the possibility to choose, but, if the conditions that render a choice possible are absent, then human freedom, historical freedom, is being denied. Thus, the creative power of humankind is closely intertwined with the degree of freedom attained through a historic process; in this way, free actions result from a process of progressive liberation.

All of this framework is justified on the basis of Ellacuría's efforts to build a theory of resistance, within which humankind may bring about its own historic process and thus liberate itself. His starting point is the notion that personal freedom is not a given and must therefore be conquered. “Freedom,” he states, “without the real conditions to render it possible may embody an ideal, but it is not real since, without the appropriate and adequate conditions, one cannot be nor become what one wishes to be.” ² Constitutions, he suggests, may proclaim all sorts of formal liberties, but they can only be enjoyed by those who have access to the real conditions necessary to render them a reality (Ellacuría, 1989, p. 113). In this sense, notions like love, justice, and freedom, general principles that may determine human action, may only attain materiality by way of historic processes. In other words, love, justice, and freedom can only be attained when human beings enjoy the conditions necessary to create their own reality by way of history. And most importantly, liberation entails not just a process, but a collective one at that. It does not just depend on the individual, but on the group as well. Bourgeois freedom, which has managed to pass itself as the prevailing model of freedom, is founded on private property and wealth, though, historically speaking, it has built its framework on the shoulders of oppressed social masses. Thus, it is important to encompass a process of liberation and liberalization for the poor. Liberation refers to a more integral and universal process; liberalization, on the other hand, involves subjective and individual freedom within the framework of liberal bourgeois ideology. Liberalization may seem to pose a way to freedom, but in truth, it is a false path. It only defines freedom in comparative terms, as in having more than others; in this way, the freedom of a few is built on its negation of many others. Instead, the primary object of liberation is justice, justice for all. There cannot be freedom for all without justice for all, and vice versa. Thus, it is important to attain justice without imposing limitations on freedom. The contemplation of justice and freedom for all thus emphasizes the collective nature of things, even if the ultimate result is the liberation of an individual. Therefore, a final, key component of this process is personal as well as collective freedom from any kind of dependence that may hinder full self-determination. Quite unfortunately, this dependence involves behaviors that we have all internalized, such as consumerism, trends, passions, attractions, etc. To the extent that we share and participate in these behaviors, we are hindering the possibilities for true liberation for ourselves and others.

Accordingly, a general critique of the situation of Afro-Colombians has only happened gradually, as other individuals have brought up the rampant discrimination prevailing since colonial times (Maguemati et al., 2012). Cornerstones like the Encuentros Nacionales de la Población Negra Colombiana, the Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas, and the Movimiento Social Afrocolombiano (MSA) made important contributions. In recent years, thanks mostly to the latest constitution (1991) and law 70 of 1993 (aimed at protecting the rights of Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific basin, where some large populations are concentrated), some advances have been made, but these small accomplishments have taken place, by and large, with scant connection to the actual conditions of Afro-Colombians in previous decades. In other words, the Colombian Magna Carta was updated to bring the legal framework in sync with contemporary reality, but precious little has been acknowledged as the result of the historic problematization of race, particularly in the case of earlier personalities like Pambelé, still a beloved figure for many Colombians. In general, Colombian culture and society tend to have a highly mediated relationship with the past. Within the prevailing narratives of the history of national sports, Pambelé's fall from Olympus is interpreted mostly as a matter of individual irresponsibility, regardless of the fact that in the 1970s there was scant awareness of racial inequities. It simply was a matter not to be discussed. Yet it is hard to imagine the Bogotá of the 1970s, with its limited understanding of difference, the unquestionable result of a centralist mindset promoted by the concentration of the national government's bureaucracy, and not think that, in many ways, the degree of alienation experienced by Pambelé through his numerous outings and public appearances must have been acute, even if he was consumed by triumphalist fervor. After all, it is no accident that Pambelé's spectacular rise started in nearby Venezuela, where, given the higher degree of investment in boxers at the time, he seemed to overcome the obstacles rampant in Colombian society.

Pambelé's early years were characteristic of many Afro-Colombians in the 1940s and 1950s. San Basilio de Palenque, the place where he was born, is now celebrated as a free town, the sort of place founded by African slaves when they managed to escape from the Spaniards (or, in the case of Brazilian quilombos, the Portuguese). In 2005, UNESCO declared it a masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Nonetheless, for all the official pride, it is only nowadays—in December of 2021—that the streets of this village of roughly four thousand people are finally getting paved. ³ Never mind the place has been there since 1691. In fact, it was largely thanks to Pambelé that the village gained prominence in national imagination; people wanted to know where the champ was born. Prior to his existence, San Basilio de Palenque had stood neglected for centuries. Thus, Pambelé's childhood was mired in extreme poverty. Like many Colombians, out of need, he migrated to the nearest large city—the department's capital, Cartagena de Indias—seeking better fortune. There, he tried to make a living by selling smuggled cartons of cigarettes near the shantytown of Chambacú, located between the fortress of San Felipe de Barajas and the ocean, just outside of Cartagena's walled city. A general eyesore, Chambacú was finally torn down in 1971, amid a process mired in corruption. Ultimately, like other humble Afro-Colombians, such as Bernardo Caraballo, the first local to contest a world title, Pambelé ended training at a local gym, pursuing boxing as a way out of poverty. He became a prizefighter at the age of eighteen. Back then, many boxers struggled within poorly funded official leagues—as he did, with 3 amateur fights and, after January 31, 1964, 32 as a professional. Desperate to survive economically, Pambelé got to the point of betting against himself, in a move penalized by the Colombian Boxing Federation; this was the main rationale for his migration to neighboring Venezuela.

Cervantes trained successfully as a boxer in Venezuela—back in the day, the Colombian boxing scene was small change, in comparison—where boxing promoter Ramiro Machado resorted to racial resentment as motivation, habituating Cervantes to abuse. Using offensive epithets (“Negro de mie …” [Sh**** n*****]) and belittling language (“Seguirás siendo un negro más, un negro pobre más” [You will remain another n*****, another poor n*****]), Machado would fuel Cervantes's ire, transforming him into a formidable pugilist under the dutiful watch of trainer Melquíades “Tabaquito” Sanz. ⁴ On October 28, 1972, he beat Panamanian Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer to become the world's junior welterweight champion. On March 6, 1976, he lost the title to Puerto Rican Wilfredo Benítez, only to regain it in Maracaibo, Venezuela, on June 25, 1977, after beating Argentine Carlos María Giménez. On August 2, 1980, he finally lost the title to Aaron Pryor in Cincinnati. Though he fought a couple more times, he never again participated in a world title fight. Still, the length of his time as a champion and the number of times he managed to defend his title successfully represent milestones for a country that, until then, had not held a world championship.

Through his prolonged reign as champion, Pambelé's chaotic life involved struggles with drugs and was besieged by all sorts of upstarts trailing his money. Compounded with years of alienation—back in the day, Afro-Colombians lacked any means of legal protection from discrimination—the outbursts of glory and celebration brought Pambelé down to his knees, lacking the context or formation necessary to deal with so much upheaval in his life. Thus, his predicaments exemplify the impossibility of escape from historical reality, regardless of exceptionality, despite his willingness to push the envelope. As the first leading contemporary Afro-Colombian, Cervantes embodies the structural failings of a system bent on violence against Afro-descendants, limiting their intent to further the human experience. ⁵ In his times, the structure of power was so prejudiced that it was inevitable for a prominent personality of African descent to undergo meteoric rise and fall from grace, given Colombian society's lack of empathy with the quandaries of beleaguered ethnicities. The exacerbated nature of his story, given the accompanying stresses of his dazzling boxing career, highlights the lack of societal and cultural assessment of a population still coming to terms with its tradition of prejudice, as evidenced by recent events. ⁶

In El oro y la oscuridad, his award-winning chronicle on the life of Pambelé, journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos narrates how then President Misael Pastrana Borrero (1970–1974) convened Pambelé to numerous official events, seeking to benefit from some of the boxer's goodwill and popularity. Salcedo Ramos is well known as one of Colombia's leading journalists, sometimes compared within the national context to US narrative icons like Gay Talese. His book, while a jewel of research journalism, perpetuates the conventional reading of Pambelé's life. Given Salcedo Ramos's interest in the actual delineation of a character, this is only understandable. His object is not to develop a general inquiry of Colombian society, but to reflect on the personal circumstances of a renowned personality. During this period, Pambelé's popularity skyrocketed to such an extent that Salcedo Ramos alludes to a well-known anecdote by García Márquez: upon the Nobel Prize winner's arrival to an official event, someone mentioned the most important Colombian alive would be present, to which the writer immediately reacted asking whether Pambelé was attending (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, p. 22). Nonetheless, Pastrana, the last president of Colombia's Frente Nacional (1958–1974), the agreement by which Liberals and Conservatives agreed to alternate power following the populist dictatorship of General Guillermo Rojas Pinilla (1953–1957), must have been aware of the historical inconsistency he was promoting. In the Colombia of this period, the presence of an Afro-Colombian at the side of a chief government executive, rather than among the public, was most surely an anomaly. If Afro-Colombians ever showed nearby, it was within the audience: quite likely, the downtrodden masses of the Caribbean coast, the inhabitants of the ill-treated department of Chocó, or the neglected communities of the Pacific coast. It is important to clarify that, while African descent is blatantly evident among the inhabitants of Colombia's Caribbean coast—where Pambelé was born—the majority of Afro-Colombians actually live on the Pacific coast; their presence accounts for the degree of abandonment and lack of infrastructure evident throughout this latter region. Even Pastrana's son, Andrés, then an eighteen-year-old just graduated from high school at Bogotá's prestigious Colegio San Carlos, an environment that, quite assuredly, evinced utter lack of social and racial diversity, brought Pambelé along to many events. Years later, in the course of his presidential campaign, Andrés Pastrana Arango would try to visit Pambelé during a crisis in Cartagena, arguing that he wished to be seen by the side of his “buddy,” that visibility was the outcome of friendship, with a patronizing air and favoring an act of image appropriation characteristic of his politics. It was precisely this sort of manipulation that contributed to psychiatrist Christian Ayola's decision to send Pambelé to Cuba for treatment, since, by the next morning, the front page of the local press included images of Pastrana with Pambelé under the headline “Pambelé Joins Pastrana” (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, p. 27). In Colombia, it was clear to Ayola, Pambelé was the object of such exploitation and mockery that a judicious rehabilitation of the boxer was effectively impossible.

It is important to provide some context to the cultural politics of the time. Back in the 1970s, Bogotá and many of Colombia's Andean cities lacked much cultural diversity. It would take years—and for Venezuela to come to its knees—for Colombia to experience a massive wave of immigration; for centuries, the country had experienced extremely low rates of inflow, as the government made it difficult. Homogeneity, a trait praised by a conservative culture still bent on binary political alternatives, defined everything. Geopolitical fragmentation, condoned by the country's abrupt geography and lack of infrastructure, prevailed, enhancing this sense of regional homogeneity—even today, Colombia's highway network ranks low in the region. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, in one of his few genuine remarks on Colombian society, García Márquez claims—in the voice of Colonel Aureliano Buendía—that the only difference between Conservatives and Liberals in Colombia is the time at which they attend mass; such was the affinity for convention. In the 1970s, Bogotá was just beginning to emerge from its depiction by García Márquez as a dark, somber city in the mountains, clouded by eternal rain; in a way, imagery of this kind explains the traditionalist bent of its Eurocentric elite. As a provincial capital, Medellín was not far behind. With its proud paisa heritage, it has such a reputation that, even today, multinational companies based in Bogotá or Cali deem it impossible to penetrate the city's market without home-grown connections or the appointment of locals as representatives or members of their managerial structure. ⁷ This circumstance is the recognized outcome of a deeply regionalist society, opposed to the power of the capital and bent on the uniformity of its mores and values. In sum, the periphery responded to central privilege with more of the same: chauvinism and ethnocentrism. Even in the 1980s, when migration to the capital city from many of Colombia's outlying provinces validated the argument that the capital city was the melting pot of the nation, the notion did not stray far from the interpretation that Bogotá embodied a summary of all Colombian identities, reaffirming the thesis supported by García Márquez: Bogotá thought it was Colombia, never mind the fact that the very layout of the city's grid perpetuated social boundaries and extreme class stratification. ⁸ If Colombia came together in Bogotá, it did so by enforcing borderlines and keeping groups apart. ⁹

Much of this way of thinking dates back to the nineteenth century, when academic discourses emerging from the interior of the country validated its position at the heart of the Colombian nation, rendering the provinces inferior through carefully documented constructs founded on notions of climate and geography. The contemporary essentialism of many Colombians, in which nationality is something almost intrinsic to the fiber of their nature, is the result of a lengthy, dutifully supported cultural practice sponsored by Andean elites, desperately set on hegemonizing the rest of the country. Admittedly, their efforts are rather clumsy. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for the degree of dissolution of the Colombian state during the late twentieth century, involving armed struggle, widespread disregard for the law by multiple factions, and the sporadic tension between the capital city and other regions. While class rules in Colombia as a societal paradigm—Colombians have a well-deserved reputation as some of the most classist Latin Americans; class is even evident in the way utility bills reflect social strata—back in the 1970s, race remained a yet undealt-with cultural issue, carefully concealed under a veneer of regionalism and a tapestry of nations. When many alluded to region, it was code for race, for how the country's population had been racialized. As an Afro-Colombian and Costeño (a native of the Colombian Caribbean), Pambelé surely must not have had it easy.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which Colombian culture decided to imagine Pambelé as a hindrance. At some point in time, Colombians started joking that Pambelé resembled dinosaurs, because they both had been grand in the past, but they no longer existed; Salcedo Ramos even makes reference to this joke in his narrative (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, p. 24). What remains clear is that, once he made it to Venezuela, Pambelé was a straight arrow. He was a responsible, hardworking boxer, who recognized in his career a way for the future, following strictly all recommendations by his training team. As Salcedo Ramos points out,

Remember that, since he was a child, he had to be the father of his five brothers, because the real father, old man Manuel, had traveled to Venezuela and it had been years since anybody had heard from him. And, when he became world champion, he brought electricity and running water to Palenque, progress for town, yes sir, with the president and all, which is something old men still talk about. He was a very proper man! Now you may see him as crazy, but he took care of his people. When he won the title and earned five thousand dollars, he paid for his mom's refrigerator—which was about to be repossessed—and finally bought his first queen bed, since up to that moment he slept with Miss Carlina on a narrow box spring. Level-headed, my friend, level-headed. And honest. One could send a bag of gold coins with him and not even one would get lost. He didn't owe anyone a cent. On the contrary: he took off his clothing to give it away. He worked hard to get what he needed. Before a fight, he wouldn't drink sodas, abstain from greasy foods, shied away from stews, well, he couldn't be bothered. He took better care of himself than a bishop, my friend. He went to bed early and exercised a lot. He even spent nights in a separate room, watching videos of the boxer he would fight, thinking where to hit him with those fists that, according to journalist Melanio Porto Ariza, contained chloroform. (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, pp. 36–37)

Pambelé's accelerated demise is most likely linked to the fact that, by the late 1970s, drug trafficking was beginning to impact Colombian society heavily. Santa Marta Gold, a renowned Caribbean variety of marihuana, was already a recognized staple, but it was cocaine, with its greater profit margins, that was being pushed as a more cost-effective export product. Pambelé's celebration of his many victorious bouts as champion—sixteen successful fights, amounting to a lengthy period of time that acquainted and accustomed many Colombians with the previously unfamiliar notion of winning—must have involved contact with cocaine, which, though its trade was not focused on a local market, was not an uncommon sight in the national nightlife. Though the cartels were busy exporting sizeable shipments to the US and Europe, trying to satisfy the incessant demand by all means available, a fractional amount remained at home, targeting local consumption. After all, class A drugs, such as cocaine, were out of the financial reach of most Colombians at the time, shielding them from potential harm. Cocaine paste, known locally as bazuco and much more affordable, eventually took care of this lack of purchasing power. Instead, pure cocaine was an upscale drug, mainly marketed to people with greater economic capability, like Americans and Europeans. As a world champion, with a steady flow of dollars at hand and a very active social life, plentiful public appearances, and invitations to events, Pambelé qualified as an easy target for dealers and acquaintances.

It also did not help that Pambelé, in a clear example of bad judgment, chose to move from his humble home to Cartagena de Indias’ premier neighborhood: the peninsula of Bocagrande, the customary bastion of the city's upper class and where Salcedo Ramos is keen to point out an Afro-descendant had never been accepted as neighbor (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, p. 65). Pambelé even stopped frequenting the public market of Bazurto, a working-class enclave he used to visit regularly in his earlier days. Cartagena de Indias is well-known as a historic slave port—thus its sizeable population of Afro-descendants—but its upper class bears a well-deserved reputation as one of the most entrenched and bigoted ones, openly boastful of lineages that, dating back to colonial times, establish its members as clear exemplars of Spanish—i.e., unmixed—descent, claiming even pureza de sangre (purity of blood). In a place where racial mixture is particularly evident, it may seem of utmost importance to clarify your standing, given identitarian insecurity. Unlike now deceased middleweight boxing champion Rodrigo “Rocky” Valdés (1946–2017), who chose to remain in the middle-class neighborhood of Crespo, from where he managed his financial affairs with little interaction with the upper echelons of Cartagena's society, Pambelé sought social mobility. After all, coming from such low status, it was almost inevitable that he opted for something higher. He acquired a new social circle and habits, thinking naïvely that money would be able to transcend racial prejudice. With this alleged mobility, came contact with unsavory characters who, according to most friendly accounts, attempted to benefit from Pambelé's proximity. Some, like Oswaldo “Gato” Sánchez, an ex-partner of Machado's, even argue a relative called Antonio Miranda was responsible for his perdition. Miranda appears on a YouTube video claiming Pambelé was being defrauded by Machado's circle. ¹⁰ In a way, Valdés, the second Colombian boxer to conquer a world title, also benefitted from the fact that his rise represented less of a novelty, as Pambelé's outsized image had already habituated Colombians to a winning streak. In addition, if Pambelé had a big personality, Valdés was well known for his quiet, easy-going demeanor. It is also important to consider that, just like Pambelé, Valdés's career started beyond national borders: in this case, training in Queens, NY, with Gil Clancy. It was only until the arrival of Fidel Bassa (in 1987) that a Colombian boxer would gain a world title thanks to a fully national team, led by Barranquillero promoter William “Billy” Chams Salum; Miguel “Happy” Lora, though earlier, was under the direction of renowned Argentine trainer Amílcar Brusa, frequently considered the best Latin American trainer in the history of boxing.

The truth is that Pambelé's ever-presence in the Colombian society of the time—in media and advertising—resulted from the overall willingness to be associated with a winner. Prior to Pambelé, Colombia had never conceived of itself as a winning nation. The verb and nationality simply never went together. Pambelé changed everything. After him, it was feasible to imagine it—the spell had been broken. Before one could blink, he showed up in all kinds of commercials, billboards, newspapers, and magazines. This obviously brought about a huge shift in the way Afro-Colombians were perceived and treated—well, at least with respect to the extensive degree of social invisibility preponderant in the past. Colombia was a country where even tropical music orchestras, bursting with mestizos and mulattoes, had been whitened in the process of attaining national popularity, as they moved from Caribbean seaports to the cities of the Andes. Never before had an Afro-descendant appeared on the covers of so many publications, adverts, and/or signs—and in a good light on top of that. I recall it as a distinct moment in my childhood, because, up to then, Colombian advertising and press had sported the habitual Latin American white-washing, in which the ethnicity and racial background of characters in commercial imagery fails to correlate with the appearance of the crowd walking in the streets. ¹¹ Consequently, the fact that Pambelé was highly visible and perceived as socially competitive by many people who previously had not deemed Afro-descendants as politically or economically relevant (or lacked any habit of social contact with this kind of difference) leaves much room for thought.

At the end of the day, Ellacuría recognizes the disappearance of ideological or cultural alternatives in the world. Within this unimaginative mindset, a particularly dehumanizing brand of capitalism is portrayed as the only remaining way to structure societies. While capitalism initially embodied a mode of economic production, it is clear that nowadays it stands for a cultural ideology, which, in its latest inception—neoliberalism—is profoundly alienating, entailing extreme individualism, social Darwinism, ego- and ethnocentrism, lack of solidarity, and unbridled consumerism. This is an alienation that evidently suppresses any possibility of attainment of a liberated subjectivity and an expanded interior life. This model is, by all current accounts—it is imperative to contest it—unsustainable. The problem of solitude, dissatisfaction, tedium, and even recklessness in rich countries is but a reflection of the shortcomings of this resultant estrangement (Ellacuría, 1989, p. 107). Given the rise of neoliberalism throughout the continent, a single model—the competitive individualism of liberal capitalist societies—has emerged compatible with the economic and technological demands of privileged countries. Within this logic, peripheral societies have increasingly become the subject of transformations that would allow them to engage industrialized ones by way of addressing cultural and ethical patterns interpreted as problematic, in a way such that their integration into the logic of neoliberalism would be facilitated.

This, in short, is what happened to Pambelé. By falling into the logic of a society that conceived a very limited number of possibilities for him—all within a paradigm that enshrines individualism and competition, compensated by material gains—Pambelé fell short of a number of expectations. Had Pambelé enjoyed the conditions to engender his own reality, rather than emulate and fall into the habits of liberal bourgeois ideology, perhaps he would have enjoyed a better chance to live like a successful Afro-Colombian on his own terms. In Colombia, his life has been habitually depicted as that of a martyr, though paying minimal critical attention to the collective role of Colombian society in his life. That is, in terms of collective assessment, Pambelé's bad luck and ill behavior have been appropriated to excuse the absence of combined social responsibility or even the limited number of possibilities that the Colombian society of the 1970s offered him. Though to this day the Colombian government awards Pambelé a meager pension, little has been said about a 1970s society in which virtually all possibilities of progress were closed to Afro-Colombians. And, in the possibility of social ascent and/or mobility, the only option for the poor, like Pambelé, was to follow a way that led to the enshrinement and confirmation of capitalist values, be it by way of the acquisition of material possessions or through behaviors that emphasized consumerism and a very limited notion of freedom, i.e., the liberty to define yourself according to your consumption habits. In Consumidores y cuidadanos, Argentine-Mexican theoretician García Canclini discusses empowering aspects of consumerism as a response to capitalism, despite being criticized occasionally for what some judge as a too conciliatory take on the topic (García Canclini, 2001). Pambelé's time was before the massive onslaught of neoliberalism, so his responses clearly did not entail this level of sophistication. Thus, we witness his fall into excesses, drugs, and bad company. Within this framework, the array of possibilities in Colombian society and culture for an Afro-descendant of the 1970s, regardless of how the prizes from his fights qualified him to operate within the prevailing economic and societal logic, were rather limited. A repertoire of possibilities available for the construction of an alternative historical reality in the 1970s was simply not there. And this fact is amiss in conventional discussion of Pambelé's tribulations. My object here, clearly, is not to victimize the boxer; that has already been accomplished repeated times. My point is to draw attention to the fact that his misfortune was not just his own making. Subsequently, the boxer's misfortunes have not been embraced as an opportunity for contrition, for the assessment of national responsibility, rather than the indictment of an individual personality in particularly challenging circumstances, as the first Afro-descendant ever to be celebrated on a massive scale by modern media in contemporary Colombia.

The myth of the down-on-his-luck boxer does not help either, perhaps because it has been embraced and ratified equally by other nationalities—definitely including the US; think of Joe Louis and his financial troubles, to name a blatant example—to justify their discriminatory ways and prejudice. But the US carries on with its own sorry story of the affairs of Afro-descendants and other communities of so-called color. (The fact that the consideration of color only adds to the contemplation of whiteness as a ruling paradigm does not escape me.) Next to this, Colombian society necessarily falls short. In general terms, the many depictions of Pambelé's life suggest one of two things: either the boxer acted as though he operated within a vacuum or his actions were the outcome of sheer misguidance and lack of character. In any of the two cases, collective responsibility is blatantly absent. According to the popular narrative, Colombian society had very little to do with his misfortune. Most biographical material on Pambelé, including Salcedo Ramos's chronicle and many journalistic efforts in other media—even the relevant episode of Ramón Jimeno's research journalism show for the Caracol TV network, “Genio y figura” (A Leopard Cannot Change its Spots)—embrace this viewpoint. Nearly nothing has been written claiming a certain responsibility for a society and culture that, to this day, excels at aversive racism.

Pambelé never really had the possibility to enact his freedom, quite simply because it did not exist at the time. Thus, notions suggested by Ellacuría come into play. The prevailing conditions of historical reality in 1970s Colombia precluded Pambelé from attaining a form of identity with a more felicitous resolution. In the 1970s, Afro-Colombians were not contemplated as fully functional or capable within the context of national society—rescinded to the status of “eternal children,” like most Amerindians across the continent—disregarding entirely the fact that the expectations for a successful life were circumscribed to a very limited catalog of identities. Afro-Colombians were simply not meant to be winners, even in the realm of sports. Thus, the fact that an Afro-Colombian was the first one to show his fellow nationals the feasibility of international success in sports was an event the culture was clearly unprepared to handle well. Even if Pambelé excelled as a boxer, the prevalent dominant logic dictated his eventual fall from grace. That was the expected price to pay for having transgressed the established racial order in a Latin American nation of the 1970s. Having flown too close to the sun, Icarus fell to his death.

Among the extensive anecdotal evidence available in Colombian sports circles, there are two concrete examples of incidental prejudice in Pambelé's life. One, though suggested earlier and perpetrated by a foreigner, took place in and outside Colombia, in a way such that it was condoned generally by followers and enthusiasts. It appears documented not only in Salcedo Ramos's masterly account, but also in the show directed by Jimeno, which draws a balance on the careers of Colombian sports personalities like strikers Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama and Faustino “El Tino” Asprilla, and boxers like Pambelé, and is available on YouTube (posted by Jimeno). ¹² I am talking about the extensive verbal and psychological abuse by Ramiro Machado during the training sessions and most of Pambelé's career. In a literary fashion, Salcedo Ramos's account offers an origin for Machado's behavior, framing it as a moment of discovery, in which the manager exclaims, “Son of a bitch n*****, you’re good for nothing!” And later, “You will end in Palenque harvesting yucca, which is the only s*** you know how to do.” In the case of the video, the account is better documented, as it includes comments by another Afro-Colombian, respected sports journalist Eugenio Baena, who recounts various epithets—SOB n*****, you will be a slave if you fail to win this fight; mother******, use your jab; what's wrong with you? N*****, what's wrong with you? You will forever be an inferior race if you fail to win this fight!—as examples of the kind of language employed by Machado to “motivate” Pambelé. Along the same lines, during an interview for “Genio y figura,” an aged Machado appears comfortably seated justifying his behavior, replying, “Sometimes it's necessary to say things that are ugly so they (boxers) will react.” In the end, what remains clear is that Machado's verbal abuse of Pambelé was well within the range of expectations of ill-treatment against Afro-descendants at the time. Machado may have been a racist, but, more than anything, he was representative of the ingrained, structural racism of this period.

In retrospect, things are a little bit different nowadays—times have changed and people are more critical of behaviors of this nature—but it is clear that, if it happened as frequently and was condoned at the time, it is because, back then, it was viewed as normal. If this was a language employed in the streets and nurtured by conventional wisdom, it surely did not come across as strange in the context of such a testosterone-driven sport like boxing. Thus, the abuse not only speaks of race but also accounts for disparities in the understanding of gender. To be a “man,” Pambelé had to take the abuse. In the video, Baena explains that Pambelé actually excused Machado's mistreatment, claiming it was well intended. Such is the degree of internalization of this mistreatment in Pambelé that he fails to view it for what it was: blatant racism and machismo. As long as Afro-descendants are treated with this kind of language, their realm of possibilities in society is definitely restricted. Thus, how is it possible to fathom a correlation with the Ellacurian version of freedom? Baena himself appears slightly obfuscated in the video simply because he is an Afro-descendant himself, though at the end he mocks—in a humorous re-enactment of the boxer's internalization of his limitations—Pambelé's defense of Machado's abuse, trying to make light of it.

The other concrete mention of abuse is at a rather late point of his life when Pambelé is undergoing treatment for his drug addiction. Initially, Pambelé joined the local branch of the well-known rehabilitation program developed by Hogares Crea in Puerto Rico. It would be the first of many failed attempts at redemption, as I will explain later, given his persistent relationship with people that exploit him even at this late point in life. The CREA program's object is the eventual rehabilitation of the drug addict and, to an extent, it resembles the method of Alcoholics Anonymous. At some point, the addict must accept comments and charges by his mates in an exercise that seeks to bring down the individual's spirit of denial. In a way, the dynamics of the exercise replicate the abuse of military boot camp, in which an individual's personality is broken down, only to be reconstructed later according to a new self. The object, some argue, is to rebuild the patient's psychological makeup. In the case of Pambelé, Salcedo Ramos clarifies how he was labeled “an SOB n*****, big-headed and ugly” during the exercise (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, p. 41). Though explicit language is not too evident, some of this process is also recorded in the second video of the series posted by Jimeno on YouTube (Jimenoramon, 2010a, 2010b).

The fact that Pambelé had to deal with criticism of this nature even at this rather late point in life, when his misfortune was blatantly evident to all Colombians, hints at the nature of the abuse he must have endured prior to this moment. It is true that Pambelé has been diagnosed with Parkinson's and bipolar disorder—illnesses that could be related to the punishment received through his career, as research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has proven in the case of American football players and boxers (e.g., Muhammad Ali) suffering repeated blows to the head—yet his multiple attempts at rehabilitation attest to a willingness to do something about his situation. From 2006 to 2010, he participated in a variety of programs: at Hogares Crea in Barranquilla, the El Bosque and San Pablo clinics in Cartagena, the Paso a Paso Foundation in Medellín, and the La Luz Foundation in Bogotá. In December 2008, he was hospitalized at the La Inmaculada clinic in Bogotá, with severe problems in his kidneys and brain. There is also the time in which Ayola sent him to Cuba for treatment. In all, it is said he has dropped out of treatment on more than 29 different occasions. ¹³ Also, it is important to note that this cycle is enabled by Miguel Salvador Gómez Osorio, a man who has made a career out of exploiting Pambelé in the latter part of his life—Gómez Osorio writes books on the boxer, which he then sells at presentations—in the same spirit as many others who took advantage of the boxer during the 1970s. It is Gómez Osorio who encourages the boxer to leave treatment so he can sell books. Soon afterward, once the boxer relapses into some ill behavior, Gómez Osorio sends him away for more treatment, all with the tacit approval of the Colombian population, which is well informed of the boxer's misadventures. It is for this very dynamic that, even if we imagine his previous abuse as less explicit, there is no doubt that, given the lack of exposure to difference of many sectors of Colombian society prior to the rise of the boxer, racial prejudice must have played a pivotal role in Pambelé's persistent delusion with respect to his world title, willing to cling on to it as the only way to redeem himself in the face of extensive abuse. Only if he was “the champion” was it possible for him to withstand the persistent mockery and discrimination of co-nationals unaccustomed to viewing an Afro-descendant as a positive role model. Pambelé is a martyr, no doubt, but where there is a martyr, there is a mob.

As a boxer, his negritude was a source of threat. Early promoters, such as Cartagenero entrepreneur Nelson Aquiles Arrieta, even took advantage of the sense of fear generated by Pambelé's ethnicity. During the early part of the boxer's career, when he hadn't yet obtained the possibility to fight for a world title, Pambelé was marketed as a fighter under various monikers: La Amenaza Negra (The Black Threat), La Pantera Asesina (The Killer Panther), La Araña Negra (The Black Spider), etc. (Salcedo Ramos, 2005, pp. 52–53). All point to his race as a factor of fear. It was only after these names that Cervantes requested to be called Kid Pambelé, favoring a nickname an uncle had given him previously, hoping to honor Nicaraguan boxer Miguel Ángel Rivas, originally known under the same handle. The fact that his nicknames hinted at a menacing understanding of ethnicity is demonstrative of the manner in which race was interpreted back then in Colombia; these nicknames are from before he departed to Venezuela as the result of a fixed fight gone wrong. Given the way boxing was viewed in Colombia—basically, as an opportunity for the social mobility of working-class stiffs, not far from the way it is still viewed today—and the better salaries in the Venezuela of those days, prior to the economic debacle sponsored by Maduro's regime, moving across the border was a long-established step in the career of promising boxers. On the other side of the border, however, the politics of race did not change much, as we have seen from Machado's comments.

It is rather sad that, to this day, an adequate problematization of race still does not rank high among the interests of cultural politics in Colombia—despite the recent election of an Afro-Colombian vice president. To some extent, a political discourse bent on the achievement of political and social peace at all costs has overshadowed further inquiries on ethnic and racial disparities. Many years have passed by dominated by controversies related to the drug trade and the ensuing conflict between the forces of the state and the struggling and anachronistic subversive organizations, many of which have embraced the economics of the narco-trafficking industry as a source of revenue, giving way to a pathetic progression in their relationship with ideology. It is hard to speak of social justice and revolution when one preys extensively on the poor and the working class. Ellacuría would not have been amused. Given the sophistication of his ideas, which suggest the possibilities of alternatives for the disenfranchised, one would like to think we would still have the imagination necessary to envision more humane forms of economic growth and social organization. Nonetheless, during the last decades, aided by the pandemic, neoliberal capitalism has been extremely effective at curtailing options, both within rich countries and emerging economies.

Pambelé's saga is a testimony to the impact of race on the life of Colombian Afro-descendants. It is also a testament to the lack of historical inquiry on the role of race in the economic and political evolution of the Colombian people through the latter twentieth century. That the life of a boxer who has supposedly meant so much for the advancement of the national sports scene inspires so little examination at the collective level is a tad baffling, particularly in view of how his life story has been framed as an individual drama. When one thinks of great sports personalities like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, and Muhammad Ali, it is usually against the backdrop of their historical circumstances and how they managed and/or failed to push the envelope of their historical reality. Hence, it is only understandable that I seek to examine Pambelé's fortune in the context of a struggle for improved recognition of Afro-Colombian cultures. It is no accident that as recently as 2017 people from the Pacific port of Buenaventura and the city of Quibdó were still protesting against the lack of attention by the Colombian government. Along the same lines, the comparison with the USA is not unwarranted. The object is not to impose the views of a society ruled by a racial paradigm upon one in which class structure reigns supreme, but rather to contribute to the further exploration of social inequality as a very complex topic in Latin America, in which race continues to play a significant role, despite the persistent denial of its enactment as a collective cultural practice. To this extent, the thinking of Ellacuría, a man dedicated to the liberation of the oppressed, comes in handy.