He left football for music and acting, and has managed to lift up Chocó and the Pacific for 30 years. He continues composing and singing to his land and love, his greatest inspirations.
Hansel Camacho is river and sea. He grew up between Quibdó, the banks of the Atrato River, in a neighborhood called La Yesquita, and El Valle, a town on the Pacific coast in Bahía Solano. From there the identity and seal of the Quibdoseño were born: to carry a message of chocoanidad to the world. That has been the commitment that he has fulfilled during his 30-year musical and acting career.
Camachito, as his mother affectionately called him, is a thoroughgoing architect. From a lively neighborhood, once full of music, guitars and serenades. There he grew up following the musical heritage of the elders such as Víctor Dueñas or his uncle Ramón Gómez, who taught him the first chords on the instrument.
Since he was little he wrote songs in a notebook, a tradition he still maintains. His father, Francisco Camacho, was a clarinet player and his mother, Antonia Santos, “the one with the name of heroine”, sang with the sentiment and empiricism of the black women of the Pacific.
His childhood was influenced musically by singer-songwriters such as Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. He listened to the style of the protest song and that’s how he began to write, inspired by the injustices related to the natural wealth of Chocó, which he considers to be still in force, and by the love he feels for his native land.
“Sometimes I wondered what the use of having so many things, two coasts and two seas, so many mineral riches … the Chocó sails in its wealth and at the same time in its own misery,” said the singer-songwriter.
Despite being surrounded by music, soccer was his first love. “My life was always attached to football, and I also played very well.” So much so that in 1975, when he was 21 years old, he joined the Chocó youth soccer team. He played as a left midfielder and managed to participate in three consecutive tournaments with this team. Until that moment, soccer was his life project, so in 1978 he left Quibdó for Cali. There he spent two years playing for America.
But his career in football did not progress and the sport became a hobby that left him with pleasant experiences, as he recounts in his song Memories of football . In 1981 he traveled to Bogotá with the idea of reviving that other passion he had saved: music. With an old guitar that he called “his dream machine” and that composition notebook, he faced the cold capital and risked participating in a national contest called Compose, sing and win (1982).
He competed with the song My neighborhood , a composition that was re-recorded in 2013 under the name Condoto by the group ChocQuibTown. Without a doubt, the contest was a platform to make himself known and it opened the way to what would be the beginning of his musical career.
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His first musical participation took place in 1987 with Grupo Camagüey. He was the vocalist with César Mora, singer and actor of novels such as Los Victorinos and Betty la fea , and a friend that Camacho defines as those “bridges that helped him climb the hill of life.” It was on a trip to a presentation of the group that Camacho shared with Mora his interest in venturing into acting. “I knew I could do it well, and that’s why I commented to him,” he says. At that time César was recording Romeo and the bus and Hansel was taking advantage of the recordings to make himself known.
His first step in acting was Azúcar (1989) by Carlos Mayolo. His character was Lucio. “To build Lucio, I dreamed of my grandfather Adriano Santos. He was a 1.90 m tall black man. Lucio was the essence of my grandfather ”. With this character he managed to exploit his talent as a composer and singer, since during the series he wrote 35 songs that were heard in several chapters. From this production resulted, for Hansel Camacho, two Simón Bolívar Television Awards (1990), one for Best New Actor of the Year and the other for Best Series Music.
The path of acting prospered and, to this day, Camacho has participated in television proposals such as Oye bonita , La ramasal del cielo , La potra Zaina and La hija del Mariachi , but also on the big screen with films such as Dog Eat Dog .
He never put music aside. As he acted, he continued to compose and sing. After being part of the Changó Group (1988), he released his first musical work in the company of Pacho García, in 1990. Two years later, together with the FM record label, he published the album Verdades . There are songs like Eres , 500 years later and Truths . The latter, which in the words of the author, “was a song that transcended salsa.” The inspiration to write the success that continues to sound today in various regions of the country was “to express that the only correct way of life is to have truth in what one says and does. Only in this way will we be able to be transcendent ”.
With Truths he reached the top, and there he stayed with themes such as Latin America , a composition in which he narrates the struggle of our continent to find its true identity, or songs like Homenaje a San Pacho , which fell into the musical taste of Chocó which, over the years, has become the anthem of the Franciscan festivals in his native Quibdó. “I have never detached myself from Chocó, I convinced myself to sing to love and my land as my only truth.”
He considers himself a tireless composer. At 65, every day, he sits in front of a notebook to write. In his house he has a trunk where he keeps what he creates, hoping one day to bring those compositions to reality in his sacred space: the recording studio.
One of those more recent compositions was I need a hug . The song is “a beautiful coincidence of life”, since its lyrics have been related to the situation in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that has been experienced in the last year, but it was actually written by Hansel Camacho much earlier. For the artist, the theme is a message to meet and face the harshness of this situation.
With 30 badly counted years of artistic career, he feels satisfied and grateful, because even the dream of being a footballer lives it today through his son David, who is a La Equidad player. In addition, he shares the artistic streak with his other children. Mario is an actor and dabbles in singing; Belinda is a painter and Jefferson is a journalist.
It continues to pose new musical and acting challenges. He set out to fulfill his dream of writing scripts for television and film, and he has in mind a story about the Pacific and its roots. In music he has been able to draw inspiration from difficult situations. Recently, he wrote a song that, although joyful, keeps the nostalgia of one who has lost a friend. When he leaves, he plans to dedicate it to several friends who have taken the coronavirus.
* From the Color Foundation of Colombia.
