COLOMBIA/FILE: LEIDY TABARES, STAR OF THE FLOWER SELLER 'LA VENDEDORA DE ROSAS' IN JAIL ACCUSED OF HIRING SOMEONE TO KILL A TAXI DRIVER

Record ID: 837183

  • Title: COLOMBIA/FILE: LEIDY TABARES, STAR OF THE FLOWER SELLER 'LA VENDEDORA DE ROSAS' IN JAIL ACCUSED OF HIRING SOMEONE TO KILL A TAXI DRIVER
  • Date: 7th May 2003
  • Summary: MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) VICTOR GAVIRIA, DIRECTOR OF THE FLOWER SELLER SAYING "Lots of these kids have been killed. Some of them are aggressive, but others are really sweet people who want peace. Some of them just want to fight and they all somehow or another end up crippled or murdered." (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) JHON FREDY RIOS, KNOWN AS CHOCOLATINA AND CO-STARRED IN FILM, SAYING "With the little money that I made from the movie, I bought myself a motorcycle and then I had an accident."
  • Embargoed: 22nd May 2003 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: MEDELLIN. COLOMBIA
  • City:
  • Country: Colombia
  • Topics: People
  • Reuters ID: LVAA0U604OQZVQH1FUL6IMTCD8F7
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  • Story Text: The Colombian star of the 1996 Cannes-nominated film "The Flower Seller" (La vendedora de rosas), the semi-biographical film about street children who sold flowers to survive, is currently in jail on charges that she hired someone to kill a taxi driver.
    A male prisoner yells something obscene as Leidy Tabares slips into tight jeans and a lacy top to talk about her transitions from street kid to movie actress to jailed homicide suspect.
    The shouting, more casually violent than angry, stops as the young man lets go of the barred door separating the male and female sections of the ramshackle low-security jail and stalks off.
    Tabares does not want to be photographed near the bars and instead settles into a plastic chair in the kitchen where female inmates prepare meals.
    Despite being in jail, the petite, dark-haired Tabares still cares about her image.
    But she is a long way from Cannes, where she was feted at the renowned French film festival for her lead role in the Colombia's "The Rose Seller," made in 1998 and nominated for the festival's Palme d'Or top prize.
    Outside the jail's bolted doors stretch the harsh streets of the city of Medellin, where as a child she really did hawk flowers to survive before being briefly rescued from poverty and cheap drugs to star in the movie.
    At the time, it changed her life. Now she's not so sure.
    In November, the actress, whose career petered out after a six-month stint on a soap opera, was arrested when a witness accused her of paying for the murder of 44-year-old taxi driver Oscar Galvis. The witness said Tabares also supplied knives used to kill Galvis, even though the state prosecution service says he was shot to death.
    Tabares has been remanded in custody for a maximum 180 days while officials decide whether to put her on trial. She has a lawyer but she says he does not visit often.
    "I don't know why all this is happening. I don't have any money to pay for a killing and I don't have any reason to do it either," said Tabares, who will mark her 21st birthday in May.
    "I know that I'm going to get out and that it's going to happen quickly," she said, her voice breaking.
    A bright mountain sun is heating the asbestos roof, and the prison air is muggy. A fluffy white puppy, kept by one of Tabares' jail mates, yelps and whines, begging attention from a sleepy-eyed male warden dressed in civilian clothes.
    The cast of "The Rose Seller," were all, like Tabares, real street kids hustling for food and drugs in a city warped by the cocaine trade epitomized by its most famous son, the late smuggling king Pablo Escobar. Medellin's homicide rate, 22 times higher than the United States', has earned it the Spanish nickname "metrallo" or "machine gun."
    Director Victor Gaviria scooped them out of the slums to act in his depressingly realistic film, which impressed critics around the world.
    Memories of her time as an actress make Tabares' eyes shine. "It was a dream come true. When we went to France it was incredible," she said, smiling.
    "When Victor said 'We're going to Cannes,' I said 'What's that?' and he told me it was a city in France, and I asked him 'What's France?'"
    In the film, Tabares' character, Monica, the rose seller of the title,up murdered on a vacant lot after a glue-sniffing binge, dying just as she hallucinates about her lost mother and New Year fireworks blast in the sky above her.
    It was an easy part to play for Tabares, who slept on the streets with her own mother when they were locked out of slum lodgings for not paying the rent. She once got lost in a shopping mall and didn't see her mother again for three years, then spent time in and out of reform school for theft.
    Full of optimism, and encouraged by promises of help from the government which she says were never kept, Tabares, who was paid only $1,000 for her starring role in the film, set up a corporation to help street kids and young prostitutes.
    But things didn't work out. She couldn't find acting work and went back to selling roses. She fell in love and had a child, but that ended badly too.
    Tabares explained that her child's father was killed in their home.
    Nothing strange about that in Medellin. Many of Tabares' friends, and in fact most of the male cast members of "The Rose Seller," have been killed in gangland murders.
    Director Gaviria is saddened by the inability of his actors to overcome their backgrounds of violence and abuse.
    "Lots of these kids have been killed. Some of them are aggressive, but others are really sweet people who want peace.
    Some of them just want to fight and they all somehow or another end up crippled or murdered," Gaviria said.
    A typical hard-luck story from the cast of "The Rose Seller" is that of Jhon Fredy Rios, known by the nickname Chocolate Bar. But it's not clear whether, in his present semi-deranged state, he can remember it clearly.
    He somehow managed to get shot in the head and now lives in a wheelchair on a rubbish-strewn street corner in a Medellin slum called, appropriately enough, Sad Town. Ragged drug dealers sell marijuana and cheap cocaine called basuco as a vagrant sleeps on a curb and another, bearded and ragged, smokes dope with blackened fingers.
    Tabares has painted the walls of her jail cell a swirling purple. She treasures photographs of her young son, now almost 3 years old, and of his murdered father.
    "I miss my little boy a lot, I really do. The only thing I want is for him to grow up differently from me. And for that I want to be with him," she said.
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