05/04/2024
When touring the towns that make up what tourist campaigns call “Antioquia is Magic” you will find stories that are as fascinating as they are improbable.
One of those stories is that of a man who – without having pursued any diplomatic career, much less having left the country – became, through letters, the “ambassador” of Thames to the world, and his house in the middle of the mountains of the Southwest is a kind of “headquarters” of the UN to which correspondence arrives from all continents.
Diego Alejandro Echeverri Moncada is the name of the Tamesino who has been sending a letter and a postcard from his town to various public figures and leaders from more than 80 countries for 18 years.
But writing to famous people is nothing flashy. There are millions of them who write their diatribes in the direct messages of the networks of how famous they are on Instagram or more than 300 responses from these characterssome of them in his own handwriting.
Diego – son of Don Jairo Antonio and Doña Gloria – told years ago for the magazine El Mirador del Suroeste that all this business of letters started as a simple hobby and that he was happy to imagine that, perhaps, he was the only person in Colombia dedicated to such an unusual activity.
The taste for the epistolary world arose in Diego back in 1990, at that time he was studying at the Rafael J. Mejía High School. While there he realized that a teacher wrote to Queen Elizabeth of England to tell him that he lived in a town that shared a name with the emblematic river that runs through London. To Diego’s astonishment, the teacher eventually received a response with a replica of the monarch’s signature.
Diego is 48 years old, he is a kind and simple man. He says now what he did not recognize years ago when the first media was interested in the origin of his dedication to writing letters. At that time he said that it was a mere hobby, but today he says that it was an idea that was born with the aim of overcoming the depression left by the death of his brother 20 years ago, also driven by the desire he felt to know the world.
“I started with this around 2005 with two letters. I sent one to former United States President Bill Clinton and another to Santa Claus in Rovaniemi, Finland, which is the Christmas capital of the world. In them I expressed my admiration and gave them details of Thames and invited them to come. To translate my words into English, my friend Carlos E. Zapata helped me. I honestly didn’t think they were going to respond to me. But, about six months later, two letters arrived at my house. One was the response of Santa Claus and The other was Bill Clinton’s response in his own handwriting,” he explained.
The lyrics of famous people
After that first achievement, Diego decided to write to Queen Isabel and dignitaries from other European countries. They answered his correspondence with very positive expressions, which gave him more encouragement to continue with his hobby.
As for politicians, responses have arrived in Thames from the mayor of Utrech in the Netherlands; from Princess Haya Bint Al-Hussain of the United Arab Emirates; of the former president of Mexico Felipe Calderón; the former president of South Africa Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki; of the Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonaventura Adalbert; the Prime Minister of Monaco, Michel Roger; yhantler of the former president of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.
But Diego is not only responded to by politicians, but also by great figures in sports and the arts, such as the famous German soccer player Frank Beckenbauer; the French singer Charles Aznavour; Japanese astronaut Narishige Kanai; the New Zealand writer Joy Cowley; or the film actors Richard Dean Anderson (“MacGyver”) and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Likewise, he has addressed the presidents of Toyota, Mercedes Benz, BMW and Volkswagen.
“From there to there I began to write to the entire world, some sent responses with their private secretaries, who attached a photo of the character, usually autographed, and there are about 20 responses that are in the handwriting of these characters,” he noted. .
Diego’s story has a particularity and that is that – as he himself points out – despite that great passion that drives him to send letters with photos of his town to people from the five continents, he has never left the country.
The other issue, which he keeps like a treasure, is how he knows to which address he should send the letters in order to guarantee a response. “That for me is something simple, but that… that is my secret,” he kindly settles the matter at the insistence of this journalist.
Of course, what he does openly share is the reason that drives him to do this work. “I don’t really like showing the cards because there are people who say ‘what’s that for?’. But I feel that this is how I have put the name of Thames in the world,” he added.
“Everything more expensive”
Unfortunately, although Diego’s activity responds to the customs of other times, the problems he has to overcome to maintain it are quite current.
And according to Diego, as a result of the increase in the price of sending letters, his fans have been greatly affected. That’s without counting, he says, with the disgrace that is the postal service in Colombia.
“The letters used to reach my house in Thames and this year they have only been able to arrive one from Romania. I don’t know what will happen because no one gives explanations. Recently I had to go to Medellín to send letters to the king of England, the secretary general of the United States and the prime minister of Japan, because there is no way from here. I already sent them but I don’t know if the answers will reach me or if they will be lost along the way,” he noted.
For now, this man manages to continue with his hobby, to which radio transmissions are also added, since he is a radio amateur, with whom he says he has cultivated friendships on the five continents.
He does not rule out that in the future his legacy will become a book or end up in a museum dedicated to that increasingly scarce means of communication that is the letter.
Finally, Diego reveals which deceased characters he would like to have received a response from. “I wrote to Neil Armstrong and NASA replied with a photo of him. Still, I would have liked to have had his answer. I also wrote to King Pelé, that time I sent him the envelope with a 100 dollar bill to include an autograph. But… like the envelope – with the ticket – was lost,” she noted.
