The polished tables of the school of Chiquinquirá in Colombia, In 1967, they exhibited the same ritual every morning: children dressed in neat uniforms, immaculate notebooks and, during one of the breaks, warm bread wrapped in the paper of school breakfasts. The aroma of wheat filled the hallways.
On November 25 of that year, the city woke up in fog. No one could foresee that this would be the day when a sneaky poison would sneak into the heart of the city. More than 100 bodies, most of them children, They ended up dead just a few hours after eating “poisoned” bread.
Everyday life—the church bells, the bustle of the students, the smell of corn being roasted by a street vendor—was broken by the first whimpers of the children. In the small public school, hysteria spread like wildfire. Some students shivered, their cheeks covered in cold sweat. Others barely managed to stammer incomprehensible words. A teacher, remember:
—They ran to the teachers’ room, put their hands on their stomachs and shouted: “It hurts, teacher, it burns here.”
The clock barely read 9 in the morning. The first child collapsed in the yard, his thin head hitting the tiles. The teachers tried in vain to calm the chaos. An echo of retching and moaning rose through the hallways, infesting the ears of the survivors with horror.
“The boys screamed that their stomach hurt and fell, one after another, to the floor. Someone thought it was a virus. Nobody suspected the bread”recalls a witness.
The unexpected tragedy spread within minutes. Twenty, thirty, fifty children, the number grew with each desperate call to the small municipal hospital, whose staff, overwhelmed, improvised stretchers with wooden boards and waited for ambulances that never managed to arrive in time.
In the bakery warehouse Nutivara by Aurelio Fajardoa batch of bread was waiting for the morning distribution. There, next to the counter, the baker reviewed the list of provisions: flour, sugar, butter.
The preparation process was routine. A dough beaten to the rhythm of tradition, breads lined up on the tray, ovens lit since dawn. No strange aroma, no indication that the loaves hid a lethal danger.
The young Joaquín Merchán was in charge of starting the production of the breads and even told Aurelio Fajardo, owner of the bakery, thatThe flour had a strange and somewhat strong smell,to which he would have told him not to make excuses for not working
But something invisible and deadly slipped among the usual ingredients. The flour used that day was contaminated with an agricultural pesticide, parathiona toxic substance whose lethal dose, even in tiny quantities, could cause death in a few minutes.
The tragedy began on the night of Friday, November 24, when some transporters were going to deliver several packages of flour purchased by the Nutibara bakery by cargo truck. According to some versions, before leaving for the Boyacá municipality from the city of Bogotá, some men who knew the truck driver asked him to take two boxes with some glass jars inside to a warehouse of agricultural supplies.
The vehicle took the Ubaté – Chiquinquirá route, which was not paved, so some movements of the truck caused the contents of one of the jars that were in the boxes to spill onto the flour that was going to be delivered. The containers contained Folidol, trade name for Parathion, an organophosphate insecticide used to control crop pests.
In a matter of hours, dozens of students and teachers went into convulsionseyes wild and skin drenched in sweat. “I saw my son faint, foam came out of his mouth. I thought I would never see him again”a mother would later recall between sobs on local radio.
Chiquinquira It became an epicenter of pain and confusion. The dead, piled up, exceeded the capacity of the morgue.
The president himself Colombiain an urgent message, demanded the immediate investigation of the case and sent medical reinforcements from Bogota. Soon, the national and international press arrived, and the name of the town, best known for its virgin, was forever associated with the horror of poisoned bread.
The rumor was born almost as quickly as the tragedy. Bakery accident? Supplier error? Or a deliberate act of political “enemies”? At a time when partisan violence spread even in the most unusual settings, no hypothesis seemed entirely incredible .
The police investigation immediately focused on the distribution chain. The baker Aurelio Fajardo, a simple and affable man for the community, was arrested.
The experts examined the bags and found obvious traces of the pesticide in the samples taken from the warehouse.
The puzzle of how exactly the “poison” came to be mixed with the flour was never fully solved. Others, like the prosecutor in chargeinsisted that it was a tragic accident, aggravated by a chain of fatal carelessness.
International newspapers spoke of seventy-eight deadhalf of them minors. Others raised the figure to close to one hundred. The survivors – more than one hundred and forty – were left with neurological, respiratory and psychological consequences.
“It was not local news: it was a global scandal. We never believed that something like this could happen here, we all knew each other, there was trust,” a journalist from the The New York Times to the local correspondent.
The radio repeated the names of the victims for days, a litany doomed to be lost in the national memory. Hundreds of families watched over their children in silence. The bells tolled both for the little ones and for a collective innocence that would never return.
The city council promised changes. Control systems, supervision of supplies, greater filters in public tenders. But the feeling in the town, recorded by a journalist in recent years, was one of resignation:
—After the tragedy, for months no one wanted to eat bread. It was like a cursed symbol.
A crowd overflowed the square on the day of the collective burial. The scenes of pain were repeated on the front pages of newspapers and in the stories of chroniclers who were looking for some glimmer of meaning.
Sometimes, says one of the chronicles, a child asks his grandmother why there are so many small tombstones lined up next to the wall. She, in a low voice, answers: “It was the bread.”
