Cesar Department, Colombia, 6 October 1972. Near the Venezuelan border, in the Sierra de Perijá, the Colombian army murdered three members of the OECD (National Liberation Army) in an excessive succession. Among them was Pedro Baigorri Apeztegia, a 33-year-old and revolutionary chef from Navarre. 49 years later his remains have not been found yet.

Franco, Che and Fidel

Baigorri was born in Zabaldika (Steribar) in 1939. Due to the precarious economic situation of her family, when she was very young, she started working as a cook at the Hotel Yoldi in Pamplona at the age of 16. Then he worked at the Hotel Maria Cristina in San Sebastian and, once there, he had to prepare a meal for Francisco Franco, aboard the boat Azor, based in the bay of La Concha.

He was a chef who moved from San Sebastian to Paris in the late 1950s. Although before, the politics and ideology of the left arouse curiosity, in the French capital

Two or three years later, in 1962 or 1963, Cuban scientist and politician Antonio Núñez Jiménez (1923-1998) offered him a special offer: To address the mushroom growth project in Cuba.

Baigorri then went to Havana, accepting the proposal. He was a cook of the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, and of Che Guevara, with whom he maintained a close relationship. In addition to cooking, he took a guerrilla course and formed a group with other colleagues. Although he could stay in Havana, he decided to travel to Colombia to fight the government.

No corpses or duels

When Peter was killed, Paul worked in a news agency and received the news in a short message: “From Navarra, Spain, dead guerrillas” (from Navarra, Spain, dead belt). Without ending the dictatorship, it was not time to denounce what happened to her guerrilla relative, and the family had to thrive without bodies or duels.

Journalist Unai Aranzadi first met Pedro Baigorri in Colombia in 2005 in an ELN camp. Since then, the life and death of the Navarro have been completed, among other things, in a documentary prepared for ten years and received in a report of the journal Zazpika in 2017. The Colombian anthropologist Marco Tobón has also researched Baigorri, and the result of his work is Baigorri. A Basque in the Colombian guerrilla (Baigorri, a Basque in the Colombian guerrilla; Txalaparta, 2017). Thus, the passages of the guerrilla's life have been illuminated, but their remains remain in the dark.

Pedro's parents denounced the disappearance of his son in the Colombian Public Prosecutor's Office 30 years ago. But they both died without a response. Later, Unai Aranzadi himself came to the Prosecutor ' s Office. Finally, in 2019, family members contacted the UPUBD of Colombia, the search unit for people who consider themselves missing, and start searching for clues from Pedro Baigorri. Last September and October, they devoted themselves to the study of five corpses of the cemetery of Curumaní, as well as to the unidentified remains of several common osariums.

A little bit of dignity

At the moment these efforts have not had positive results, but Sister Mariangeles Baigorri is optimistic: “We didn’t think they were interested in their brothers and peers there. They were buried as cattle and, if they are found, we will give them some dignity.”

After 49 years, awaiting dignified burial, relatives can say that Pedro Baigorri died dignified. When he was in Colombia, his father wrote asking him to go home, and his son replied in the last letter: “Dying in a lockdown in Pamplona makes no sense. On the contrary, for people to be able to eat it is worth dying. I live in accordance with my principles and ideas, and in the end it is a tribute that I pay to you mainly. We are born and we die, and all we have left is the memory of loved ones, but to leave life something else. There is no happiness if it is not for everyone.”