To El Confidente, to Mateo Pérez Rueda
She knew they had killed him. Gloria, the teacher from Yarumal, sensed the fate of Mateo, her youngest son. As only mothers achieve that connection. She knew him, raised him, nurtured him, taught him to question, to ask, to live. They were so alike that Mateo, when he was little, avoided having his mother teach him in the same school where she worked and he studied. Not for lack of love or admiration for her, but because from childhood he chose to walk with independence and autonomy. He preferred to navigate with other teachers; he moved classrooms as many times as he could. Every opportunity that fate, at the public school of San Luis de Yarumal, led him to have his mother as the classroom teacher, he requested a change: in search of forging his own destiny.
