TIJUANA Local fans are mourning the death of Facundo Cabral, one of Latin America's most popular folk singers, who died in a hail of bullets early Saturday in Guatemala City.
Cabral, 74, was heading to the airport after a performance when his car was ambushed and sprayed with gunfire. Authorities are investigating whether the target of the attack was the concert promoter who was driving the vehicle and who was seriously wounded.
Cabral performed practically every year in Tijuana, a city he had visited since the 1960s, even before the tourist strip avenida Revolución was paved.
Not a commercial hit on the radio waves, Cabral's poetic songs about love and peace nonetheless earned him a loyal following across Latin America.
A chance phone call he once took on a television show introduced him to Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize winning nun, who became a friend. A year before she died in 1997, he accompanied her to Calcutta, where he worked alongside her tending to victims of leprosy.
In recent years he had toured with fellow Argentinian singer Alberto Cortez. Cabral last performed in Tijuana on Oct. 2 at El Foro on Revolución.
He gave an interview the day before, touching on many subjects, surprisingly starting with his view about death.
"I am strong, that's the best part of me," he began. "I was raised in a terribly strong way amid neglect, I witnessed the death of four siblings of hunger and cold during my childhood. So you can imagine, death does not worry me in the absolute because it's the first thing I experienced."
He said he had faced three surgeries to treat cancer that year and that the battle had left him physically tired – but not his spirit. He wanted to continue sharing his songs.
"I'm 73 years old, that's almost the age that you die," he said. "I like being here, but the idea of dying doesn't bother me."
In a noticeable Argentinian accent, he said he did not believe in the concept of borders. He said visiting Ciudad Juárez was the same to him as visiting a city in Vietnam.
"I'm not scared of the border," he said. "I believe there's only one land, Earth."
Andrea.garcia@sandiegored.com
