by Dr Victor Figueroa Clark
(This article, or a translated
version of it was published in Kathemerini on March 18th 2012)
Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was without doubt
Colombia’s most important political figure of the 20th century.
Gaitan combined a comprehensive political programme adjusted to Colombia’s
political reality, with an unparalleled charisma which would have eventually
taken him to the Presidency of Colombia if his life had not been cut short. His
killing changed the course of Colombian history, sparking massive violence and
enabling elites to avoid having to make broad-based concessions.
A lawyer and intellectual of modest
origins, Gaitan was a proponent of structural reforms and a fierce defender of
the powerless. He graduated from the National University with a thesis called
“Socialist Ideas in Colombia”, demonstrating an early interest in left-wing
political thought. He then studied in Italy, an experience which led to his
rejection of fascism as the method by which capitalism “defends the enjoyment
of individualist abuses by means of collective organisation”. By the early
1930s Gaitan was already a well known leader thanks to his ardent denunciation
of the ‘massacre of the banana-plantations’ in late 1928, where Colombian
troops massacred thousands of workers demonstrating for better working
conditions as later described by Garcia Marquez in ‘One Hundred Years of
Solitude’. Gaitan then became Mayor of Bogota in 1936, and was appointed
Minister of Education in 1940. In both these posts he established social
programmes and public works which further enhanced his reputation as a defender
of the poor.
By the late 1940s Gaitan had become the
unrivalled leader of the Liberal Party, transforming it from an elite-led party
to one that began to channel popular desires for change and which had
majorities in both Congress and Senate. His platform was one that demanded
‘respect for the common man’, that sought to build an economy ‘at the service
of people’ and to establish forms of participatory democracy as a way of ending
what he called the ‘oligarchic regime.’
Although portrayed as a populist leader,
Gaitan had clearly thought out both his aims and his methods. His conception of
the state was as ‘the synthesis of democracy”, and he proposed the formation of
a coalition that could agree on specific issues to advance the programme of
reforms. This alliance would have the dual benefits of avoiding ‘caciques’ [chiefs]
and violence. Gaitan did not believe in ‘catastrophic battles’. He thought that
Colombia, with its backward economic structures and its ignorant population
needed generations to achieve profound changes. His economic thought was
similarly developed - the economy was to achieve a balance of production and
consumerism, with a progressive abolition of exploitation and a state role in
planning the economy and in redistributing wealth. “We are not enemies of
wealth, but of poverty,” he said, and he argued that in Colombia wealth could
not be spread without a radical land reform programme. He also proposed
environmental legislation, labour laws - all within a transformative,
revolutionary framework. Despite his populist theatrics, this was not the
programme of a demagogue or dictator, but that of a democratic revolutionary,
and is in many respects, similar to that of Salvador Allende in Chile.
This programme and his vast popular
support made Gaitan powerful enemies. Within Colombia the landowning elites
dreaded a potential land reform. Political elites also rejected his ideas on
democracy and his anti-imperialist nationalism. Furthermore, Gaitan rose to
prominence at a time when the United States was encouraging the closing down of
democratic spaces across Latin America. After all the 9th Pan-American
Conference held in Bogota at the time of Gaitan’s assassination had as its main
aim the creation of a hemispheric bloc that rejected communism and which began
the process of framing social conflict across the region in the parameters of
the European Cold War.
On April 9th 1948,
Gaitan was gunned down as he left his office for lunch. While it is still
unknown who was behind the killing, the results are clear for all to see. Since
his murder Colombia has had an exclusionary political system challenged by
strong guerrilla movements. This has severely distorted Colombia’s development,
and has meant that Colombia, unlike the rest of the continent, has been unable
to resolve its social conflict peaceably.
Following his killing, Colombia
succumbed to a ten-year (1948-1958) period of violence, until Liberal and
Conservative elites agreed to share power, and an alternating presidency and
shared parliament were set up. Other political forces were excluded. The
violence also led to the creation of self-defence organisations by Liberal and
Communist peasants. Many guerrillas who disarmed under a government amnesty in
1958 were killed, and therefore some chose to continue fighting. Then the 1959
Cuban revolution had the effect of spreading the conviction that they could,
and should, overthrow the old system and the peasant groups became guerrilla
armies. At the same time, in order to ‘avoid another Cuba’, the US began to
train Latin American militaries in the notorious National Security Doctrine,
preaching the existence of an ‘internal enemy’, and funding the first military
operation against Colombian peasant guerrillas in Plan Laso.
While successive governments paid lip
service to the need to resolve inequality, and the importance of land reform,
the absence of real democracy and the entrenched powers of landowners meant
that change was largely superficial. Together, inequality, state negligence,
and the lack of real political freedom sustained the guerrillas. The 1979
Sandinista revolution, and the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala were
reminders to the Colombian elite that something needed to be done to resolve
the conflict, and during the mid-1980s a peace process began, under which the
guerrillas, left-wing parties, trade unions and others helped create a
left-wing political coalition called the Patriotic Union.
During the same period, to counter the
growing guerrilla presence, and guerrilla taxes and extortion, landowners, drug
traffickers and the military began to establish paramilitary armies. Equating
the Patriotic Union with the guerrillas, and operating alongside the military,
these death squads killed between 3,000 and 5,000 of its members. Since then
nearly 3,000 trade unionists have also been killed by paramilitaries. Many
thousands of human rights defenders, political activists and social organisers
of all kinds have also been killed or disappeared. And the war continues
causing immense suffering. Over 6,000 Colombian troops have become casualties
in the last 3 years, 5 million Colombians are internally displaced, thousands
have been disappeared, or killed as ‘collateral damage’ in the war.
As in the 1940s land and inequality
continue to be major problems. According to a recent UN report on 189
countries, Colombia is the third most unequal after Haiti and Angola. Labour
rights are virtually inexistent and human rights abuses abound. The political
system is still highly exclusionary, and voter abstention is routinely around
60% in the cities (and higher in rural areas). Paramilitarism and
the drugs trade have penetrated the state so far that the last president,
Alvaro Uribe, is fighting claims that he was himself a paramilitary. This is
far from Gaitan’s political and economic vision.
In short, the tragic legacy of the
assassination of Gaitan has been a society whose development has been severely
distorted by extreme violence and political exclusion. Gaitan’s vision appears
distant, and yet the resolution of Colombia’s conflict lies within it, within a
more equal, truly democratic republic where the integrity of the ‘common man’
is respected.
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