It was the last time we spoke and he knew it. Before he had said: “Eternity is a very big word. But everything is possible. The impossible does not exist. Things that are impossible today may be possible tomorrow. The right of every human being is to be free and responsible.” On that winter day in 2023, he was disappointed and argued: “This is the worst moment in history. The most hopeless. How is it possible? What is at stake is the habitability of the planet. The future of children.” Federico Mayor Zaragoza—nonagenarian, father of three children, great-grandfather of five great-grandchildren whom he, along with Cheles, his wife, has cared for—was a flag of peace and education for many people, and of many ages.
That’s why on that last day where he did the interview, being at his house near Madrid, he had just begun to organize the future and let go. His archive was at a minimum because most of the documents and books were already at the University of Granada, of which he was rector. His gesture, almost always affable, was replaced by another royal, harder one. When there is no time, there is only time for what is important. Five minutes earlier, Mayor Zaragoza had interrupted our conversation to talk to someone from UNESCO. “Educating is learning how to be in life,” he said. Afterwards, he spoke about the compass that guided his life and the culture of peace, which is his great legacy. Change the phrase “if you want peace, prepare for war —”if you want peace, prepare for war”— for another phrase: “If you want peace prepare a word” —”if you want peace, prepare the word”—.
“The world is in a culture of war and we must change it for a culture of peace. Culture is what governs the daily decisions of each person.” He expressed it in every conversation and the last time we saw each other as well, because he knew thoroughly what a seed is and that the only possible change in the face of the threat of the future is to put to work the ideas that support the words. “At the end of the day, this could also be the best time to make the change,” he said.
Federico Mayor Zaragoza—pharmacist by training, scholarship holder at Oxford, Minister of Education in the Transition, former rector of the University of Granada, introducer of the heel test for babies in Spain, accomplice of the Nobel Prize winner Severo Ochoa, one of the founders of the Center of Molecular Biology Severo Ochoa, general director of UNESCO…— was also a great reader and poet, and he tried to plant in each person words capable of operating in them a radical change, making it “free and responsible.”
In that interview he repeated the phrase that crowns his office: “They did it because they didn’t know it was impossible.” The words accompanied him. Also those of Nelson Mandela, whom he visited in prison, where he spent 26 years, “just for having dark skin.” “Mandela told me that the culture of peace could be achieved when women also made decisions, because they only use weapons occasionally.” And Mayor Zaragoza put most of the important decisions in the hands of women. Also the culture of peace, her great life bet, whose great battle was also fought in the United Nations by another woman, Nina Sibal, in 1999. And she achieved it. Mayor Zaragoza had dinner with her to celebrate. A lock of her hair fell into the soup. “Why?” Zaragoza asked. “I have cancer.” Sibal died 20 days after the encounter.
The culture of peace has been and is being threatened. But Mayor Zaragoza focused the last decades of his life on expanding it and denouncing the arms interests that push the war. Until the last moment. “History is full of miracles. In the eighties, Mandela in South Africa. “Prisoner Mandela was released from prison and, instead of taking revenge, he ended racism in South Africa,” he told me. Mayor Zaragoza has been and is a flag of peace for thousands of people.
Saying goodbye, before closing the door, Mayor Zaragoza called his wife, Cheles. He looked at her. “I have tried to do well, although sometimes I have not been home much. But she has been there, she is my partner. She. “How lucky I have been!” he exclaimed.
The door closes. But he keeps going. Great people never stop. “It doesn’t matter how many times you fall, but how many times you get up,” he assured me. “Life is incredible. Why wouldn’t death be? If someone showed me that God exists or, on the contrary, that he does not exist, it would destroy me. The only thing that matters to me is the supreme gift of freedom.”
