There are still those who protest at the gruesomeness of those high-flying melodramas, in which there is more blood than there are protagonists per square mile, and whose readers or spectators should take precautions in order not to become victims themselves of the tragedy. However, real life is on occasion even more gruesome.
There is the case that happened in the municipality of San Rafael, Antioquia, which any literary critic would condemn for its exaggeration and for not being true to life. In the foreground it seems to be a case of rivalry between two families, which might seem to disqualify it literarily, because very few people are disposed to attribute the validity to such a situation that it had two centuries ago. However, the bloody drama of San Rafael originated in a rivalry between families, and those to whom this situation seems false will have no choice but to condemn life for its lack of imagination and excessive fondness for conventionalism.
As is to be expected, there was a crime. Not a simple crime, but a spectacular homicide, in which the killer, to begin with, fired a shotgun at the victim. And then all hell broke loose for literature: after firing the weapon at the victim, the killer attacked the corpse with a machete, and finally, in an excess of impiety that could lead to thinking in a certain way of the Tartar ancestry of some Colombians, he severed the tongue without stopping to think what he would do with it, as in fact he did nothing.
The news has not earned—at the current exchange rate of the journalistic peso—more than two columns on the regional news page. It is a bloody crime, like any other. With the difference that these days there is nothing extraordinary about it, since as a news item it is too common and as a novel too gruesome.
It would be best to recommend that real-life exercise a bit more discretion.
June 23, 1954, El Espectador, Bogotá