The last flight of 'El Palomo' Usuriaga

CHRONIC

“USUUUUUUUUUUU!”. There goes 'El Palomo'. “U-YOUR-RIA-GAAAAAAAAA!”. What goals did the negro score. They were expressions of art. Quite a crack, say the Argentines. “Look what he does. How barbaric.” Eduardo Sacheri sees it in the videos and crosses his arms. There's not much to analyze. It looks on its own. “That's what great footballers do, they always choose the most difficult option.” And how difficult it was when we had to see that Maturana did not call him for the World Cup in Italy 90. How difficult it was to watch football without him present, when he was sanctioned for two years for dopping. But the most difficult thing, the heaviest and saddest thing was to see the covers of newspapers in Argentina and Colombia, which showed his photo in black and white and said that the Palomo had been killed.

“It made you get up from wherever you were,” says Daniel Galoto, who enjoyed it when he wore the Independiente shirt. The Argentines saw him, tall, skinny, black, and they didn't think he was able to play like he did. “His 1.92-meter body with movements of astonishing coordinated disorganization caught the demanding red people,” Rodrigo Tamagni wrote in 2019. “Refined with the ball, with eccentric hair and a quirky look, Usuriaga is the point of comparison for any Colombian — especially attacking — who arrived at Independiente after his stay. Nobody managed to cover their place.”

“I had the charisma that only idols can have.” Jorge Barraza highlights him as one of the best foreign players to set foot on Argentine soil. “It was abnormal,” says Jorge Burruchaga. “The elasticity I had, the dominance of the ball.” That was 'El Palomo', who always had a warm heart and a cold mind, who could never betray himself, nor in excesses, and ended up leaving too soon, not even having reached the age of 40, and even after he died he continued to cheer people up, letting a lot of people win the lottery with the numbers on his tombstone. 3582 brightened the days of 1800 names.

He was killed with the same gun, you could say, at gunpoint. The ones he did were tremendous. Bochini, Usuriaga and Aguero were the largest. All the other idols fell apart when 'El Palomo' scored a goal: Usuriaga, Usuriaga, Usuriaga, Usuriaga!” El Palomo flew high in Independiente. Of all the teams he went through, this is where he was most loved, where he could be himself the most. “Always with the Red”, say the fans. “When a player gets into the heart of a town, things go beyond football.”

It's an irony that they finished it with a 9mm. People in Argentina were always waiting for the 9th minute, because that was when the 9th, with El Palomo on his back, started to shine. “USU-RIAGA, USU-RIAGA, USU-RIAGA!” So many years later, they don't forget it. Even the little ones don't know its history. They know, since their parents show them what love for football is, who Albeiro Usuriaga was and everything he did for Rojo.

Despised in Colombia, everything he achieved, the greatest thing, was recognized on the outside. The selection led by Francisco Maturana had them from Valderrama, Rincón, Asprilla and Valencia. They didn't see it necessary for Usuriaga to be there, but they were wrong. How much more would they have gotten. They missed one that flew because they preferred those who were running. “He was an innocent guy in the middle of a football that was changing forever,” says Pablo Ramos. “What they did was cut off his legs,” Ricardo Gareca said at the time. “Albeiro made one mistake in his life, only one, and that was to have been too honest,” Ramos continues.

After the episode of dopping, which left him out for two years, Usuriaga said in an interview: “My life doesn't end here.” Reading the headline of that newspaper in Argentina today makes your blood boil. To think that they finished it later because of a fit of jealousy. Al Palomo was murdered on February 11, 2004, on a Wednesday, a football day. I was 37 years old when it happened. He had spent time since his glorious days at Independiente and his golden years in Spanish football. I was without a team and was in talks to sign with a club in the far Middle East, or so they say, what you can read out there. He was going to go to Japan to close his career, but it was not enough.

Those who were there when it happened, in that corner of the 12 de octubre neighborhood, in Cali, tell how it happened: the sounds of gunfire, the smoke of burning gunpowder, the tree that housed the bloody body of the Palomo, before it took a few steps and ended up lying on the platform, while its executioners, on board a motorcycle, were they lost in the streets. Beyond pain, there was poetry at that moment. The Palomo fell like the winged bird it always was. Slowly on the floor, cold, quietly.

“People in Colombia have been very ungrateful to him,” said his sister Yolanda, at some point. El Palomo was born, perhaps, in the country he wasn't. What would have happened to him if he had been Argentine, for example. He would appear in encyclopedias and magazines under the category of “genius”, along with Maradona or Albert Einstein. What would have happened if... That's all I can think of asking. The same question that, for sure, his family asked himself when he fell dead, and the fans of the Red, and everyone who ever wanted him.

Somehow, his football was a reflection of his life. Always different, rebel. When he was killed, when he took his last flight, his sister Carmen had been called to warn him, but she didn't think he was serious and didn't care about it. How aggressive our decisions can be, and how quarrelsome. It was 7:20 at night and Albeiro was playing dominoes in a little shop in the neighborhood, where he used to meet friends. Then the people from Molina arrived, those from 'La Negra', and they shot him dead.

First they said that he had been murdered because he witnessed, days earlier, a murder in the neighborhood. Four years after his death, the prosecution decreed that it had been a matter of jealousy. El Palomo died because of the jealousy of a coward, as if he were one of those supposed fans who killed the other for wearing the rival's shirt from the yard. Jefferson Valdez Marin was the name of the gang leader who killed him. What fault could Usuriaga have had for messing with his ex-girlfriend, and what could he know. Almost like when the striker missed the goal ahead of the goal, so was his death, a matter of definition, of decision, of eggs, but this time it was not up to him, but to the one who saw him from afar. A kind of midfielder of those who shoot to kill, of those aggressive ones who don't play to play but to hit. One of those dirty things that people rarely remember. The scene was stained, bathed in pools of blood, the cards and dominoes dotted with scandalous red. And again poetry. All red in his last seconds alive, like the red of the shirt he wore and the one he gave so much to.

Damián Muñoz, who is mentioned in an unsigned chronicle that Colprensa allows to read on the web, works as a prop for Independiente's youth teams, bearing the nickname Usuriaga tattooed on his body. “I sometimes argue with those who only remember Bochini when it comes to talking about idols,” he says. “I ask you, what about the Palomo? That was a guy to imitate: the madman threw the ball forward and nobody knew what it would end up in (...) Where people went, they were delirious, it was like Maradona, everyone wanted it.” And yes, in Avellaneda, if you ask, Albeiro Usuriaga is Maradona, a God.

The death of a God hurts more than anyone else's, because it is to whom one prays, to whom one gives oneself with blind faith. So long after, the versions that there are about how all that day happened in the neighborhood, are still confusing. All good stories have different ways of being told and this is one of them. Even in death El Palomo was great, it still is. Once they put in the Pascual Guerrero Stadium a marble plaque that said: “This box was built by the Mayor's Office in memory of Albeiro Usurriaga 'El Palomo'. Santiago de Cali, August 25, 2004.” It was then taken off the hook when the stage was renewed. In Argentina that wouldn't have happened. He would have stayed forever.

On the day of her wake, Cali dressed up to party. They probably ran out of flowers that day. “Somehow, we knew something like this could happen to him. Usuriaga was a guy who was always walking on the edge of the ledge,” Barraza says. “But not because he was a bad guy, but because he was an angel. That was it. You couldn't fall. Albeiro was an angelic guy.” His sister Yolanda says that even after his death, they still felt him close. “My mom dreamed about him one day. And he said that in the dream, he had told her that he was leaving. She asked him how so. Yeah, I'm going. How is that, she asks. Who is he going with. I'm going alone, Mom.” But the truth is that he is not alone. Thousands of souls accompany him, chant him, celebrate him.” We felt his lotion,” says Yolanda. And it is that the perfume, the scent of El Palomo has not been able to leave this land, and it will not leave as long as it is remembered. It has been 18 years and our skin still stands up with its sanctions, we still hear the cry of goal, the choir with its name: “USURIAGA!”

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