The brewer who ended up allied with Prisa on Cadena Caracol

In the summer of 2005, the biggest corporate operation in Colombia's history took place, when the country's main brewery was sold to the South African company SABMiller for 7.8 billion dollars. Behind this transaction was Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the most important magnate in that Latin American country. His family had been the main shareholder of the brewery company since the sixties, with a tradition in the sector even further back in time, when in 1933 his father acquired Cervecería Barranquilla y Bolívar.

The businessman was the son of a Sephardic family established in Barranquilla (Colombia) since 1915, but born in Panama because that was where the hospital his mother had chosen to bring him into the world was located. Since the early 20th century, the Santo Domingos were involved in business and were very successful. Their initial activity was import and export, based in New York City. Coinciding with the 1929 Crash, the family temporarily settled in Spain, but Julio Mario Santo Domingo would only stay there for a few years, because as soon as he finished his primary studies, his parents sent him back to Colombia to recover from certain respiratory problems (as a consequence, he was saved from experiencing the Spanish Civil War, which was about to break out). As his behavior while studying in Bogotá was not as desired, his father decided he should continue his high school studies in Massachusetts, where he did not pursue university studies, but he did achieve a high level of English and a good handful of friendships.

Once settled back in Barranquilla, and before taking over his father's business, he had many intellectual interests, so he surrounded himself with local writers, to the point of becoming part of the so-called Barranquilla Group, the collective from which Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez would emerge. In the fifties, he was a member of the editorial committee of the magazine Crónica, a publication that, curiously, talked about literature and football.

In the mid-fifties, he began to take over the family businesses, and one of his first involvements was in 1955, when he signed an agreement with the Americans from Reynolds, in the aluminum sector, for the multinational to enter Colombia. In the sixties, the father retired definitively and left the way clear for our protagonist, who set out to grow the family empire. The first step was the progressive acquisition of the Bavaria brewery, with which we opened this story, and which ended up merged with the family company, Águila, an evolution of the original Cervecería Barranquilla y Bolívar.

With the death of his father (1973), a process of diversification of investments began. This is how he set foot in sectors as diverse as finance, insurance, tourism, transport, food, services, and media. In this last area, in 1986 he cast his net over the country's most important station, Caracol Radio, of which he bought 50%. A few years later, he opened the doors of the network to the Spanish firm Prisa, which became his partner. The portfolio also included the newspaper El Espectador, one of the oldest and most prestigious written press outlets in Colombia. For a time, he also owned Avianca, the flag carrier airline in his country.

The holding company that grouped the family's stakes was born as Colinsa and was later renamed Valores Bavaria. In the nineties, it controlled about 120 companies, which placed Julio Mario Santo Domingo among the hundred richest men in the world according to Forbes, the specialist publication in the field. He became friends with Henry Kissinger and had frequent dealings with United States presidents such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. In the 21st century, the holding company was renamed Valorem, and today it has significant stakes in Caracol Televisión, El Espectador, the Cine Colombia network, the D1 supermarket chain (the most important in the country), as well as forestry, natural gas, transport, and real estate companies.

Since the late seventies, he lived in Park Avenue (New York), the city where he died in 2011, leaving a fortune valued at 8.4 billion dollars. Two years later, his granddaughter married Andrea Casiraghi, of the royal family of Monaco.