El Bogotazo

Even attempting to understand Colombia´s incredible history of violence is a major undertaking. After all these years here I have been unable to do so, but history helps to have little peeks into the mess and to get in hand at least a few more pieces of the puzzle. Today, April 9^th, is a special historical date for any Colombian worth his or her salt... let´s see why.

Today Colombia is remembering a particularly interesting and incredibly crucial day in her recent history: on April 9, 1948, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the man who has been this country´s most revered political leader of all times, was killed in Bogotá. Minutes later, his assassin was captured and lynched by a mob that very quickly got out of control and almost destroyed the city, in what has been called since “ The Bogotazo”... something like an attempt to depose the President, vent repressed anger, solve old animosities, and just steal as much as possible, all at the same time (see Paul Wolf´s article in English for a detailed account in http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/gaitan/gaitanbogotazo.htm).

Fidel Castro was in Bogotá at that time, trying to “help” Colombian and Latin American students gathered in a Pan American congress to protest against the presence of US Gral. Marshall, who was also visiting Colombia those days. When the violence erupted, Castro thought that the revolution had started and tried to organise the different groups he was in touch with and he knew were against the government (students, workers unions, even the police), but chaos and blind rage was just too much even for him, and the communist party in Colombia was too weak and divided and could not capitalise that “golden opportunity”... in Castro´s own words.

Violence in Colombia was not unheard of. The infamous “War of a thousand days” at the beginning of the XX century had set the tone for the relationships between the two main (and by then almost lonely) parties: Liberal and Conservative, which in turn were the heritage of the deep divide between the main two leaders of the revolt of Colombia against Spain a few decades before: Bolivar and Santander. Anyway... Gaitán, a Liberal, had divided the party a few years before and hence the President at the moment of his death was a Conservative, but it was evident by then that Gaitán would win the next elections by a massive landslide... but three bullets stopped him.

That day, 60 years ago, it started in Colombia a period known as “La Violencia” (The Violence), which says a lot if you think that you can call a certain period as “The” violence in such a violent country. The truth is that during those years (that officially ended in 1957... see below), an undefined but huge number of Colombians were brutally killed all over the country (although the slaughter in some areas was worse than in others; the countryside was notoriously dangerous, not so much the cities). Liberals killed Conservatives and vice versa, with great gusto and sadism. Everyone was suspicion, everyone was suspicious. As Conservatives were associated with the Catholic church (whereas Liberals were associated with the philosophical tradition of French “free-thinking”), religion found itself mixed into the cocktail, and the Colombian Christian church paid more than its share of blood and pain. Liberal crowds just saw religious ghosts everywhere and killed Christians because they were Christians, and Conservative mobs thought that if you were not a Catholic you were a Liberal, and therefore you had to be killed, of course.

In 1957, allegedly as a way to stop the violence that was bleeding the country to death, (and also to stop the dictator General Rojas Pinilla in his tracks, as he had turned into a popular political leader), the Liberal and Conservative parties signed an agreement (called, o surprise!, “The National Front”), in which they agreed to gentlemanly alternate at the helm of the government and have an equal number of MPs for 16 years. So, everyone was happy, except of course those who were neither Conservative nor Liberal or even those who belonged to those parties but were opposed to the National Front (including Gral. Pinilla´s followers). They saw their possibilities of democratic political expression thwarted and so decided to assume alternative roads to power and decided to fight for the transformation of the contry... that´s the moment in history that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) were born (to speak of those still active), as well as the now defunct M-19 (the boisterous, flamboyant guerrilla that stole Bolivar´s sword, took hostages at the embassy of the Dominican Republic and the Supreme Court), as well as the many other guerrillas that mushroomed in those decades (the Popular Liberation Army, the Revolutionary Guevarist Army, Quintín Lame... and so on).

I think that in honour of historical truth, it has to be acknowledged that all these groups started denouncing and facing a real situation of injustice and wrong. They all started with good reasons for embracing a cause, and by people who sacrificially gave up their way of life and many of them even their actual lives in their attempt to create a better world, very much in accordance with the widespread idea that violence was the necessary catalyst for real, deep, long-lasting change.

Today Colombia commemorates another anniversary of Dr Gaitán´s death, and it still mourns tragically for that brilliant future that was not. Sadly, it was not the last time she would live such a terrible experience... but I´ll tell you about that another day.