In 1948, Colombia was a country where sixty per cent of the electorate voted Liberal and yet the Liberals kept losing. Where a candidate could mobilise a hundred thousand people in silence without the government responding with a single word. Where the most popular politician in the country walked without an escort through the centre of Bogotá at midday. Gaitán did not die through carelessness. He died because he had built, for the first time in Colombian history, a real majority outside the control of the elites who administered both parties. That majority was the problem. His disappearance was the solution.
I. The political country and the national country
Gaitán had a thesis. Not a slogan, not a conventional government programme, but a structural diagnosis formulated with the precision of someone who had studied criminology in Rome under Enrico Ferri and returned to apply that perspective to the Colombian body politic. The thesis was simple and devastating at once, Colombia was not one country but two, separated by a distance measured not in kilometres but in interests. The first was the political country, the closed universe of the traditional parties, the notable families, the law firms that confused rights with inheritance, the offices where decisions were taken before Colombians woke up. The second was the national country, the majority that worked the land without owning it, that inhabited the cities without deciding anything in them, that paid with its body for the colour wars that others declared from the comfort of their haciendas.
This distinction was not new in political theory. What was new was the use Gaitán made of it. He did not turn it into university doctrine or a party programme; he carried it to the public squares in a language that a day labourer from Tolima could recognise as his own. His rhetoric was incendiary in form but reformist in substance. He did not call for the destruction of the system but for redistribution within it; he did not propose revolution but something more uncomfortable for the elites, real democracy. That moderation was the central paradox of his figure. He was dangerous not because he wanted to topple the order but because he wanted it to work for the majority, and the Colombian order was not designed for that.
The Liberal oligarchy feared him as much as the Conservative one did, because Gaïtanism did not recognise the separation between blues and reds as a real dividing line. The line that mattered was another, the one separating those who accumulated from those who produced, and that line crossed both parties with indifference. When Gaitán proclaimed that the people were superior to their leaders, it was not demagoguery; it was the description of a fact that Colombian institutional architecture had spent decades concealing.
The diagnosis was not abstract. Gaitán had built it on concrete evidence, beginning with the work that placed him on the national political map, the parliamentary inquiry into the 1928 banana massacre. He was twenty-nine years old when he arrived at Congress with a mountain of documents demonstrating what the government of Miguel Abadía Méndez preferred no one to name with precision. He spent two years gathering testimonies in the banana zone of Magdalena, speaking with widows and survivors, building the file that would make the official version untenable. The Colombian State had fired on its own citizens to protect the interests of a foreign company, and the political elite of both parties had closed ranks to ensure that truth reached no judicial consequence. That was the first broken contract Gaitán documented. It would not be the last.
II. The project the elites could not tolerate
What Gaitán proposed was standard Liberal reformism in any post-war European democracy. Agrarian reform that would break the latifundist structure inherited from the colony, the very structure the previous episode documented as intact after a century of independence. Labour protection, a living wage, access to justice for those without a family name. None of those proposals was radical in historical terms. What was radical was that they came from someone who was going to win.
The great Liberals, the Lleras, the Santos, the Lópezes, did not fear Gaitán’s programme because it was extremist. They feared it because it was executable. A Gaitán in the Palace was not a political adversary operating within the same rules. He was a creditor. He owed his power to the workers of Tolima, to the peasants of Cauca, to the city employees who had voted for him knowing exactly what they were asking for in return. Repaying that debt meant redistributing what the Liberal and Conservative elites shared in silence, the land, State contracts, impunity. That is why the 1946 division was not a political miscalculation. It was a class decision.
III. The arithmetic of Liberal suicide
On 5 May 1946, Colombia elected a president and the Liberal Party chose to lose. The numbers are so transparent they speak for themselves. Mariano Ospina Pérez, sole Conservative candidate, obtained 564,661 votes. Gabriel Turbay, the official Liberal candidate backed by the party machine, obtained 438,225. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the dissident Liberal candidate, obtained 358,957. Combined, Turbay and Gaitán mustered 797,182 Liberal votes against 564,661 Conservative votes. A united Liberalism would have won by more than 230,000 votes.
It did not unite.
The question that arithmetic raises is not why Conservatism won but why the Liberal leadership chose to divide. The official answer for decades was that it was a miscalculation, an excess of personal ambition, the inability of two candidates to yield. That version is insufficient. The Liberal Party leadership knew the numbers, the pollsters of the time knew the numbers, any politician with basic experience knew the numbers. If it chose not to unify, it was because a determining fraction of the Liberal elite calculated that a Conservative government was preferable to a Gaitán presidency.
That calculation was not wrong on its own terms. Ospina Pérez was an Antioquian industrialist from a notable family, a man who spoke the same language as the great Liberals on everything that mattered, property, hierarchy, order. Gaitán was something else, a son of a modest family who had got where he had through sheer intelligence and who owed a debt to those who had backed him, a debt he intended to repay through policy. For the Lleras, the Santos, the Lópezes, a Conservative in the Palace was an adversary. Gaitán in the Palace was a class problem.
There is a precedent that the miscalculation version systematically omits. Between 1934 and 1938, Alfonso López Pumarejo had attempted what in Colombia was called the Revolution in March, a programme of moderate reforms that included Article 6 of the 1936 constitutional reform, which established that property has a social function. The result was the systematic reversal of every advance under the following government. The Liberal elite that had applauded López in speeches sabotaged his policies in practice, using exactly the same instruments it would later use against Gaitán, the judicial machine, Congress, economic pressure on the allies of reformism. What happened in 1946 was not an improvisation. It was the application of a method the ruling class had rehearsed for a decade and knew worked.
Turbay left for Paris after the defeat, where he would die on 17 November 1947 in circumstances the Colombian press noted with little attention. García Márquez would write decades later that he died among paper flowers and faded tapestries, a phrase that captures the insignificance of his end. Gaitán, in contrast, stayed. In the legislative elections of March 1947, his supporters won majorities within Liberalism. On 24 October that year he was proclaimed sole leader of the Liberal Party. The man who had finished third in the presidential elections now controlled the party that had rejected him. He was the undisputed favourite for the 1950 presidential election. Two and a half years remained.
IV. The March of Silence and the months that remained
In January 1948, armed Conservative groups massacred fourteen Gaïtanists in the department of Caldas. This was not an isolated episode. The Colombian countryside had been living a systematic political violence for months in which the police, frequently of Conservative extraction under the Ospina government, operated with a complicity oscillating between negligence and direct participation. Gaitán had documented these facts before Congress using the same methodology he had employed in 1929, evidence, witnesses, names, figures.
The institutional response was silence.
On 7 February 1948, Gaitán convened the most extraordinary demonstration Bogotá had seen in its republican history. Nearly a hundred thousand people arrived in the city centre from different regions of the country. They came dressed in black and they came in silence. There were no slogans, no political-colour flags, no platform speeches. The only sound was that of feet on the pavement. They stopped in front of the Presidential Palace, their backs turned to the building, and Gaitán delivered the Prayer for Peace before that silent tide looking elsewhere.
The political gesture of turning one’s back to the Palace was not a metaphor. It was a diagnosis. Ospina Pérez did not respond publicly to the March of Silence. He did not summon Gaitán, did not offer guarantees, did not acknowledge the violence denounced. The State demonstrated that it could ignore a hundred thousand people mobilised peacefully and in organised fashion without consequences for its stability. That demonstration completed the pedagogy the banana massacre had initiated, civil protest, however massive, did not modify the decisions of those who controlled power.
What happened between 7 February and 9 April was not a truce. Violence in the countryside continued with the same systematicity, carried out in large part by the so-called chulavita police, a name taken from the Boyacá municipality from which many of its members came. The term was not pejorative but descriptive; it named the social origin of a body that operated with a class ideology disguised as partisan affiliation. Gaitán continued filing complaints before Congress. The government continued not to respond. The mechanism had become so predictable that it no longer required concealment; the State could ignore systematic violence against its own citizens without that indifference costing it any visible political consequence.
Fifty-nine days after the silence of the hundred thousand, Gaitán was leaving his office on the carrera séptima in Bogotá.
That morning of 9 April, Bogotá was also the diplomatic capital of the Americas. The Ninth Pan-American Conference had been under way in the city since 30 March, presided over by United States Secretary of State George Marshall. Dozens of national delegations filled the hotels of the centre. Among the foreign delegates was a twenty-one-year-old from Cuba attending as a student representative, who had tried to meet Gaitán the previous day and had a second meeting scheduled for that afternoon. His name was Fidel Castro.
V. The 9th of April, the Bogotazo and impunity as doctrine
Gaitán had won a difficult case that morning. He was defending an army lieutenant accused of killing a journalist, and had won in a victory his courtroom colleagues described as brilliant. He left euphoric to have lunch with a group of friends and colleagues. It was approximately 13h05 when Juan Roa Sierra was waiting for him on the pavement of the carrera séptima and fired three times at point-blank range. Gaitán fell and was taken to the Central Clinic where he died without regaining consciousness.
Roa Sierra was captured immediately by the crowd that had witnessed the attack. He was beaten, dragged through the streets and lynched before any authority could intervene or interrogate him. The killer died without having declared who had sent him, if indeed anyone had. The subsequent investigation, fragmentary and quickly shelved, concluded that he had acted alone, motivated by a mental disorder. No proceedings ever established a chain of responsibility. The file was closed on the most convenient hypothesis for all concerned, that of the solitary disturbed individual, and the Colombian State never reopened it with any seriousness.
The news spread through the city within minutes. What followed was not a riot but an implosion of the symbolic order. The crowd that had marched in silence on 7 February found that silence had served no purpose and responded with noise, with fire, with the destruction of everything that represented the power that had just demonstrated its nature. Trams overturned, government buildings in flames, shops looted, armouries seized. The city that had hosted the continent’s diplomatic conference became a battlefield that the army took days to bring under control.
Fidel Castro took part in the disturbances, took a rifle from a police station occupied by the crowd and moved through the city in ferment for hours before being evacuated to the Cuban embassy. He would write decades later that the Bogotazo was the first great lesson of his political life, the demonstration that popular rage without organisation dissipated without results. The lesson he drew was different from the one Gaitán would have drawn, but the source was the same, the 9th of April.
The Bogotazo left more than three thousand dead in Bogotá in the first days. The flames were visible from the eastern hills for a week. The city centre took years to rebuild physically and never rebuilt politically. The Pan-American conference was briefly suspended and then resumed elsewhere, as though the hemisphere’s diplomatic agreements could continue normally whilst the capital burnt.
Ospina Pérez decreed a state of siege before the fires in the centre had been extinguished and called on the Liberals to form a national unity government, the technical term for an alliance that the Liberal leadership accepted not because they believed in it but because they had no other visible option. The men who had divided the party to prevent Gaitán from reaching power now sat in a cabinet alongside the Conservative government that division had produced. The architecture was impeccable in its cynicism; the same system that had generated the crisis offered its own continuity as the solution to the crisis. Nothing that the 9th of April had produced was to be questioned. Nothing that the 9th of April had destroyed was to be rebuilt. The elite agreement, broken for the national country, remained intact for the political country.
Cierre
In the fields of Tolima and Cauca, in the plains where bipartisan violence had already begun before the 9th of April, the news arrived at the speed at which fear travels. What the Liberal peasants understood was not only that Gaitán had died. They understood that the State which had not protected him would not protect them either.
There is a difference between what happened in 1928 and what happened in 1948. In the banana massacre, the State fired on workers to defend a foreign company. The mechanism was servile but comprehensible in its logic; the State was protecting the capital that financed it. In 1948, the State assassinated its own possibility of reform. It was not defending anyone external. It was destroying something internal, the only route remaining for the system to transform itself from within without collapsing. That is the most serious crime, not the one committed against a man but the one committed against a possibility. What came afterwards, La Violencia, the self-defence groups, Marquetalia, was not inevitable. It was the logical consequence of a system that preferred to burn its exit rather than use it…
G.S.
Sources
- The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia, Herbert Braun (1985)
- Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, Marco Palacios (2006)
- Orden y violencia. Colombia 1930-1953, Daniel Pécaut (1987)
- Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez (2002)
- Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia, Gonzalo Sánchez / Ricardo Peñaranda (eds.) (1986)
- El manifiesto de la plataforma del movimiento gaitanista, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1947)
- La victoria estratégica, Fidel Castro (2010)
- Parliamentary debates 1929 and 1948, Colombian Congressional Archives
