A Dark Prince of Colombia By Robert Drynan
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n Cali, Colombia, Alberto Hernán Guerra, a young man suddenly found himself as head of the substantial family business when his father, Don Saturno Guerra, was hospitalized in Houston, Texas, and diagnosed with a terminal illness. The milling business in Colombia was just emerging from almost total government control. Prices of inputs and products had been officially set. The state imported the wheat and oversaw the sale of flour, setting quotas to each baker. Industrial processors, such as cookie factories and pasta plants, were subjected to the same regimen. Alberto Hernán wanted to draw on my eleven years of experience in the freewheeling milling business in Venezuela. In 1981, I accepted employment with the Guerra flour milling company. But soon after I arrived in Cali, Don Saturno miraculously recovered and returned to Colombia to find me seated at the right hand of his son and in charge of his mills, and making drastic changes in their operations and management! Don Saturno and I immediately clashed. He inserted himself into dayto-day operations. I moved my office twenty miles from Cali to our largest mill, in the city of Palmira. One time I ordered payment of overtime to a man I had asked to come in and perform a task for me on Sunday. Don Saturno cancelled the payment and told the worker that he should be grateful he had a job. Workers in Colombia were submissive and furtive, a boot on their necks. They sought to remain unnoticed. They refused to meet my eyes when I talked to them. During my year and half there I got to know very few of them by name or personality. Don Saturno, a small, wiry man, about 130 pounds, had enormous presence. His thick, white hair thrust upward like an eagle’s crest. His brooding eyes were set in a narrow, scowling face with harshly etched lines. He patrolled his domain; mills, pasta plant, and sugarcane fields, finding fault with everything. His eyes flashed, almost shooting sparks. He shouted in a shrill, grating voice.
He didn’t spit flames, but evoked the Devil in his paroxysms of rage. When he stalked through the plants, the workers stopped, taking off their hats, eyes downcast. The living image of a Spanish Grandee, he was El Patrón. But Don Saturno was not a Spanish Grandee. In a land where the poor man never rises from the bottom, Don Saturno Guerra did. His story comes from various sources, some his personal narratives and some accounts by his many enemies. He began as a poor trucker in the southern city of Pasto, capital of Nariño state bordering Ecuador. Running freight and produce to Cali, several hundred miles away, Guerra obtained a contract to transport gold from the Nariño mines to the Bank of Colombia in Cali. The narrow road between the two cities cuts through soaring, heavily forested mountains and magnificent views overlooking deep canyons, home to rushing streams and riverine lakes. It is to this day a wilderness region much favored by bandits and guerrillas. The story goes that one day Saturno staggered into the Bank of Colombia in Cali and informed the officials that he had been assaulted by bandits. The gold bars had been taken and his truck driven into a ravine and burned. Within a year Don Saturno had purchased an interest in a flour mill in Pasto, and a year later he purchased machinery for a second mill that he built in Cali. Most of the preceding part of the story comes from his enemies. A hard businessman, he had plenty of bitter enemies. He did it the “Old fashioned way, he earned them!” The whole truth is probably far more complex, but I am sure that his start did not come from saving his earnings as a truck driver. On two different occasions Don Saturno regaled me how he had come by the mill in Palmira. The most modern mill in South America, it employed the most advanced technology available from world leading Swiss milling engi neers, too sophisticated and expensive a technology for the still primitive industry in Colombia. The owner, a poor businessman, found himself unable to Continued on page 24
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El Ojo del Lago / August 2022
