On April 9, 1948, a political crime forever divided a Latin American country and opened an era of violence that would last decades. That day, in Bogotá, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered. The reaction to the assassination turned Colombia’s capital into a hotbed, with unleashed violence that would go down in history as the Bogotazo, the country’s great watershed in the 20th century.
a popular leader
Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was 45 years old. and was one of the main figures of the Liberal Party. He was President of Parliament, Mayor of Bogotá, Minister of Education and Minister of Labor. He was a defender of popular causes and had jumped to the front line with the call for the Banana Massacre, which occurred at the end of 1928, when the Army repressed striking United Fruit workers. Gabriel García Márquez would allude to that fact in One hundred years of solitude.
Gaitán promoted the parliamentary investigation of what happened and that was the springboard to the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. He founded the National Union of the Revolutionary Left and later merged with the Liberal Party. His time as mayor of Bogotá showed him concerned about the needs of the poorest.
After passing through the Education and Labor portfolios, Gaitán led a dissident faction of the liberals in the presidential elections of 1946. The conservative Mariano Ospina prevailed with 40 percent. Gaitán reached 27 percent and was third.
At the end of 1947, the Liberals reunited under the leadership of Gaitán. At the dawn of 1948, liberal crimes occurred in various parts of the country. Gaitán called on President Ospina for the cessation of violence. Nobody doubted that he would be a Liberal candidate in 1950 and, at the head of a unified party, with serious chances of winning.
The crime
At noon on April 9, 1948, Gaitán left his office for the Hotel Continental in Bogotá for lunch and a series of meetings. On the agenda, he had the opening of the Latin American Student Congress, a kind of counter-summit to the IX Conference of the OAS, based in the Colombian capital. One of the student delegates from Cuba wanted Gaitán to inaugurate the Congress and that is why he was going to meet on the afternoon of April 9 with the liberal leader. The assassination prevented Gaitan and Fidel Castro from meeting.
At the door of the hotel, Gaitan was shot at. They took him to a hospital and he died within minutes. Earlier, a mob lynched Juan Roa Sierraa 26-year-old bricklayer. It was never clear if he had been the author of the shots, or if he was the criminal perpetrator and had acted alone or at the instigation of others. The truth is that after his death they stripped him naked and dragged him down the street while the violence spiraled at the same time that confirmation of the assassination arrived.
The violence that doesn’t stop
The police were overwhelmed, while Ospina and the liberal leaders looked for a way to meet. A mob wanted to enter the presidential palace and the Army had to come out to repress. Bogotá was a battlefield. More than 140 buildings were affected by the riots, which spread to other parts of the country, and it is estimated that there could have been up to 3 thousand dead. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro returned to Cuba with the help of an Argentine youth delegate: Antonio Cafiero.
The Bogotazo derived from the Gaitan crime was the culminating point of more than twenty years of clashes between conservatives and liberals. One year after the coup, the Conservatives celebrated the victory of the forces of order, while the Liberals gathered 100,000 people in an act in memory of Gaitán.
The Conservatives retained power in the 1950 elections, with the far-right Laureano Gómez, who further tensed social conflict, leading to the 1953 coup and the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Little by little, political violence was directed towards rural areas in the form of guerrilla hotspots.
The key moment had been April 9, 1948. An assassination opened a Pandora’s box and decades of violence in the Caribbean nation.