This Saturday, May 16, at 11 a.m., Radio Nacional del Paraguay and Paraguay TV will broadcast live a special program in memory of maestro José Asunción Flores (1904-1972), creator of the Guarania. Hosted by journalist Héctor Riveros, the event will feature María Victoria Sosa, general director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (OSN); Luis Álvarez, director of the Orquesta Nacional de Música Popular Paraguaya (ONAMP); and journalists and researchers Antonio V. Pecci and Alcibiades González Delvalle, both from the Ateneo Cultural José Asunción Flores.
Born in the Chacarita neighborhood of Asunción, Flores had a childhood marked by poverty and began his musical training as an apprentice in the Banda de la Policía de la Capital. In 1925, after experimenting with the rhythm of the Paraguayan polka, he created the Guarania, a slower, more melancholic musical genre that sought to express the heroic character and sentiment of the Paraguayan people. His political activism and defense of workers earned him recognition, but also persecution and a long exile that, despite keeping him away from his homeland, spread his symphonic work internationally.
The program will address both the technical analysis of his emblematic works and the circumstances of his death. Flores died on May 16, 1972 at the Sanatorio Mitre in Buenos Aires, a victim of Chagas disease, contracted in childhood. His death in exile was marked by censorship and the impossibility of returning to Paraguay due to restrictions imposed by the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. His remains were initially deposited in the pantheon of the Sociedad Argentina de Autores y Compositores (SADAIC), in the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
The panel of analysts will revisit the process of repatriation of his remains, which only materialized in 1991, already in the context of democratic transition, with great popular emotion. Flores' ashes were transferred to the square that today bears his name and that of his collaborator Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, and he was posthumously awarded the Orden Nacional del Mérito.