Editorial The Heraldo

The best carnaval of the world - Spanish

It has to see it, to live it, to dance it and to enjoy it. Our Carnaval will be able not to have the fantastic luxuries and brass foils of the one of Rio de Janeiro. But it has in sweeping abundance - since they have said to all the costeños experts in the subject an incomparable espontaneidad and a wealth to it folkloric. Difficult to find in other Carnavals of the planet.

The great barranquillero photographer Enrique Garcia who has seen the Carnaval during years, through their wonderful lens, describes to our celebration standard in a beautiful, comparativily magnificent phrase as one of its multicolors photographies: " the Carnaval is like thousand plays in a single scene".

And in effect, that is the Carnaval of Barranquilla: an immense one and renewed collective theater in which all the passions arise as if it was a giant animal that wakes up rugiendo and unfolding its indómita force and sweeping energy. A theater multiple, filled with parodias and allegories that, according to the personal taste or inclinations, space for all its personages has: a coqueta and bold woman, somebody of the local, national or international present time, a negrita puloy, a monocuco, one marimonda, a bull, a donkey, a dog, a tiger, gorila or any other species of the Zoological loose carnestoléndico and jumping by the streets.

Maribel Padilla, manager of the Foundation Carnaval of the South-West, also defines ours magna celebration like: "a extravagance of pure feeling of the town, whose preoccupations by the state of violence of the country are erased, while in the middle of the joy and its love to the life it shows his identity, their roots, their authenticity temporarily".

Or in the words of barranquillero professor Rafael Mazenet Grove: " the Carnaval costeño, and the one of Barranquilla in individual, is the great scene in where that way of being Caribbean which it are expressed by means of gestual, graphical, verbal, musical the language and through the dance, the color and the disguise explodes". That it is in which we are the costeños from Batalla de Flores.

It is to say: the Carnaval is the alive simbolización of the comedy that mofa of the daily life in which the tragedy usually is all-powerful. He is a little while collective, fleeting and intense, that, by means of the satire and the ridicule, shows to us, the other way around, the reality of every day. That that becomes so routine and tiresome that there is to at least once throw it by the window to the year.

It is a seasonal celebration and close able to shake the soul and the skeleton to all the barranquilleros and costeños to them that live it and they enjoy it. From the day of the Side to the midnight of today Tuesday of Carnaval. When Joselito - his anthological personage dies again and he is shrouded happily in his eccentric and festive coffin. Resting of its four days of jolgorio and borracheras. Rest of which one will rise, again, the following year, lúcido and jubilant, to again undertake its eternal ritual of berroche and joy.

For that reason this gust of wind of madness that, like every twelve months, has returned to happen over the city and the region is all the opposite of the devastating Biblical plagues. Its vivifying blowing extends and electrifies bodies and souls by all the corners of Caribbean geography. He is "levántate and it walks", that resonates in all the country removing it from its habitual postration. And preparing it, with the model costeño, to leave the marsh of the desperation in which one has been being sunk by tántas committed political stupidities at the highest level for tántos years.

We are in agreement with the supreme and spontaneous authority of this celebration, Reina Maria Gabriela Diago Garcia, when the received impulse of its extraordinary predecessors has said yet in the middle of the frenzy of comparsas who turn and advance by the halls, streets and seats, within the delirious multitude, that the one of Barranquilla has been always and will continue being " the best Carnaval of the world". By the same, it is necessary to already begin to prepare the next one