On the worst night for Laura Daniela Villamil, Saturday, August 17, several friends did not find fire extinguishers nearby to put out the flames that burned 80% of the young actress’s body. Villamil, 28, worked at the main office of the iconic Andrés Carne de Res restaurant, in Chía, a municipality adjacent to Bogotá. There, she and other colleagues entertained children and adults with plays or circus acts: her Instagram account shows her dressed as an astronaut, dog, clown, cat or Yoda. The place is a tourist stop for international travelers: in 2016 it became a gastronomic destination in the guide Lonely Planetalong with other elite restaurants such as Leo or Harry Sasson. Unlike these, the experience at Andrés combines traditional food, circus and partying, an invitation to enjoyment in a huge house decorated with knick-knacks. That Saturday, Villamil was going to entertain the night public, as he did every weekend for five years. But it was tragedy, not the circus, that took over the stage.
A short video on social media shows part of what happened: in a dark room she is dressed, like other actors, in a straw skirt, and some colleagues are handling torches. When one of the actors lowers one to the ground, a spark or flame lights Villamil’s skirt, the straw lights up quickly and the actress runs between colleagues and diners with her body on fire. The video stops there.
“I can’t talk about that video because it hurts me a lot to see what she experienced,” says Santiago Villamil, her brother, over the phone. He says that he learned from his sister’s colleagues that this act of fire had already been carried out in outdoor spaces, but it was the first time it had been done in an enclosed space. “It impresses me because the restaurant is made of wood and the act occurred very close to the diners,” he adds. “The versions that her colleagues have sent me is that there was no fire extinguisher nearby when my sister caught fire, and everyone was staring at her. At one point, a fire extinguisher appears, with which a diner tries to put out the fire, but he doesn’t know how to handle it, nobody knows how to handle it, and there was no action or evacuation route to protect her,” he adds.
The flames, friends say, were finally extinguished by the tablecloths of the diners who helped Villamil. She was then taken to the nearest hospital, in Chía. From there she was transferred to the Santa Fe clinic in Bogotá, where she has been in intensive care for more than a week and a half. “The doctors have told us, honestly, that the probability of her survival is very low,” says her brother.
Santiago Villamil adds that no executive from the company that owns the restaurant has contacted his family, although they have sent a “collaborator” to the hospital (“as they call their employees,” he explains) to ask about his sister’s health. The family is in the process of suing the restaurant. The company is not giving interviews to the media about this case, but in a statement it expresses its defense: it argues that from the first moment “all the established security and care protocols were activated immediately and effectively, which allowed her to be transferred to a first-class medical center as quickly as possible.”
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While Villamil is in the hospital, the Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramírez, announced that she will carry out an inspection to evaluate the facility, and says that she hopes to eventually be able to speak with the actress about her working conditions. “If sanctions have to be imposed, we will impose sanctions,” she has said of Andrés Carne de Res. “The labor dignity of artists is not negotiable,” wrote her Culture colleague, Juan David Correa, in X. And finally, President Gustavo Petro also spoke out. “Art and life or greed? Solidarity with Laura Daniela,” he wrote in X. While Andrés Carne de Res is a national symbol for tourists, for many others he is a symbol of greed, as the president questions.
Accumulated complaints against Andrés Carne de Res
For many young actors in the country, the restaurant has been a key employer for decades to survive in a very precarious labor market, that of theater and audiovisual arts. More so when it went from being a single restaurant, the founding one in Chía, to a huge chain that repeats the comparsas in other places in Bogotá, Medellín or Cartagena – it grew to the point of integrating with the restaurant group known as Grupo Conboca, where Kokoriko chicken and Mimo’s ice cream are also available. In contrast to this growth as an employer, many of the artists have denounced, for several years, labor abuses. These are complaints that, due to the iconic nature of the place, have made a particular echo in Colombian society.
“Andrés is the country of money: if you have money, you can do whatever you want,” Johan Velandia, an actor, playwright and director, a friend of Villamil and other actors who have worked in the restaurants, tells EL PAÍS. “My colleagues work from morning until dawn the next day, under a lot of psychological and work pressure,” he says. “Actresses who have to put up with drunks touching them, others who do routines and receive strong comments like: ‘You’re not funny, make people laugh, dance with customers’.” Velandia says he has spoken to two of the colleagues who were present when the accident occurred. “They told me that they were told: ‘The show must go on.’ The boys are traumatized, they can’t stop crying, they feel very guilty,” he says.
Other artists who work at Andrés Carne de Res have also expressed their work-related complaints on social media. “A few years ago, I almost died of acute peritonitis at Andrés Carne de Res. Despite complaining of terrible pain in my stomach, they forced me to continue dancing salsa in a shopping center. My body couldn’t take it anymore and I collapsed,” said artist Iván Piñacué. Another, Adolphe Beltrán, spoke of working without food or hydration under “macho, sexist treatment, dirty humor and so on, inside and outside the dressing room.” A news story from 2013 has returned to the collective memory, when a young woman reported being raped in the parking lot of the restaurant in Chía. The creator and then owner of the establishment, Andrés Jaramillo, questioned the rape before the media, pointing out the way the woman was dressed —which, naturally, generated protests. When consulted by EL PAÍS, the company said it prefers not to give interviews on these issues until the investigation into what happened to Laura Daniela Villamil is completed.
Recently, a group of actors held a sit-in in front of the restaurant’s second largest location in northern Bogotá. “Our instrument is the body, and they affected that,” said one of the protesters there. The Colombian Association of Actresses and Actors also spoke out, asking the government to verify whether the restaurant had an “emergency response route, a fire brigade and a person with knowledge of the type of clothing and materials to use when working with fire.” “Really, Laura’s case is the tip of the iceberg of labor abuse of artists,” says Velandia. “Working conditions have not improved in 30 years at Andrés.”
Andrés Carne de Res was born more than 40 years ago, in 1982, but it was in the nineties when it reached the peak of its fame: the United States ambassador, the Minister of Defense, the artist Fernando Botero, businessmen, actresses, models would go there. It was not a symbol of Colombian identity, as it is now for tourists, but of belonging to the upper social class. It was then that an anthropologist from the National University, Leonardo Montenegro, worked there as a waiter and then in security, and wrote his thesis on the culture of the place: Paying for paradise. “It was a symbolic place: people didn’t go there for the food, but because they went there to show that they belonged to a social group, to say ‘I’m one of those people,'” he added.
She remembers the art students who were performing there back then, and also the harsh working conditions: working from nine in the morning until two in the morning the next day, or the poor treatment of the then director towards the employees. And she also remembers the fire extinguishers well. “At that time, 30 years ago, there were fire extinguishers everywhere, because being a place made of wood and handling meat, they were necessary,” she remembers. Drunk people, she says, grabbed the extinguishers to play with them, spraying a friend: they became toys. Extinguishers that the Ministry of Labor will soon ask about. Extinguishers that, on the day Laura Daniela Villamil needed them most, did not appear to put out the fire in her body.
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