Colombia La Violencia
Cathedral at Pasto
Courtesy Embassy of Colombia, Washington
The following month, the inevitable explosion occurred
in the
form of the most violent and destructive riot in the
country's long
history of conflict. On April 9, Gaitán was assassinated
at midday
in the heart of Bogotá. An angry mob immediately seized
and killed
the assassin. In the ensuing riot, some 2,000 people were
killed,
and a large portion of downtown Bogotá was destroyed. The
Bogotazo,
as the episode came to be called, was an expression of
mass social
frustration and grief by a people who had lost the man who
represented their only potential link to the
decision-making
process.
Although order was restored in Bogotá and Ospina
remained in
control, the tempo of rural violence quickened to a state
of
undeclared civil war known as la violencia. La
violencia claimed over 200,000 lives during the next
eighteen
years, with the bloodiest period occurring between 1948
and 1958.
La violencia spread throughout the country,
especially in
the Andes and the llanos (plains), sparing only the
southernmost
portion of Nariño and parts of the Caribbean coastal area.
An
extremely complex phenomenon, la violencia was
characterized
by both partisan political rivalry and sheer rural
banditry. The
basic cause of this protracted period of internal
disorder,
however, was the refusal of successive governments to
accede to the
people's demands for socioeconomic change.
After the Bogotazo, the Ospina government became more
repressive. Ospina banned public meetings in March 1949
and fired
all Liberal governors in May. In November of that year,
Ospina
ordered the army to forcibly close Congress. Rural police
forces
heightened the effort against belligerents and Liberals,
and
eventually all Liberals, from the ministerial to the local
level,
resigned their posts in protest.
In the 1949 presidential election, the Liberals refused
to
present a candidate; as a result, Gómez, the only
Conservative
candidate, took office in 1950. Gómez, who had opposed the
Ospina
administration for its initial complicity with the
Liberals, was
firmly in control of the party. As leader of the
reactionary
faction, he preferred authority, hierarchy, and order and
was
contemptuous of universal suffrage and majority rule.
Gómez offered
a program that combined traditional Conservative
republicanism with
the European corporatism of the time. A neofascist
constitution
drafted under his guidance in 1953 would have enhanced the
autonomy
of the presidency, expanded the powers of departmental
governors,
and strengthened the official role of the church in the
political
system.
Gómez acquired broad powers and curtailed civil
liberties in an
attempt to confront the mounting violence and the
possibility that
the Liberals might regain power. Pro-labor laws passed in
the 1930s
were canceled by executive decree, independent labor
unions were
struck down, congressional elections were held without
opposition,
the press was censored, courts were controlled by the
executive,
and freedom of worship was challenged as mobs attacked
Protestant
chapels. Gómez directed his repression in particular
against the
Liberal opposition, which he branded as communist. At the
height of
the violence, the number of deaths reportedly reached
1,000 per
month.
Despite the relative prosperity of the economy--owing
largely
to expansion of the country's export markets and increased
levels
of foreign investment--Gómez lost support because of
protracted
violence and his attacks on moderate Conservatives and on
the
military establishment. Because of illness, in November
1951 Gómez
allowed his first presidential designate, Roberto Urdaneta
Arbeláez, to become acting president until Gómez could
reassume the
presidency. Although Urdaneta followed Gómez's policies,
he refused
to dismiss General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, whom Gómez
suspected of
conspiring against the government. When Gómez tried to
return to
office in June 1953, a coalition consisting of moderate
Conservatives who supported Ospina, the PL, and the armed
forces
deposed him and installed a military government. They
viewed such
action as the only way to end the violence. Rojas Pinilla,
who had
led the coup d'état, assumed the presidency.
Data as of December 1988
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