The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia

Preface

Preface Year after year a story is told in Bogota and throughout Colombia. It recounts the life of one man and the experiences of those who lived through the day of his death. So much has been added to and taken from the story that it now has a fictional, almost fantastic, character. "Novels aren't written to recount life," the realist Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has told us, "but to transform it by adding something to it."1 As people remember their past, however, they often transform it without the help of the novelist. I have sought to recover an assassination in Bogota for history, and present it as part of a secular process so that we may build upon the past. Colombians of an entire generation and from all social classes were unable to freely exercise their public rights after that death on April 9, 1948. This book is for them, with the hope that their children will be able to participate openly and actively in politics. As we turn events into words and years into pages, historians unavoidably add to history by drawing connections and making inferences that the actors themselves may not have. But in these pages there is much more that is missing and that I have not recovered. I am profoundly grateful to Luis Eduardo Ricaurte and all the other men and women who talked to me about their experiences. This history can only be less than theirs, for life is at its fullest when it is lived, rather than when it is told, whether as fiction or as history. Something in this book comes from the experiences of those who were living on the Calle 10 on April 9, 1948, and from Transito, a domestic servant in a petit bourgeois home in Bogota whose life crossed on that day with that of a common drifter named El Alacran. They are not protagonists in this book because they are fictional characters given to us by Manuel Zapata Olivella and by Jose Antonio Osorio Lizarazo,2 who is also one of the first historians of the events I reconstruct in these pages. I turned to fiction as I began to inquire about the events of that day, for the literary imagination was the best entry into the world of those who destroyed the center of Bogota in a few afternoon hours. No two novelists want to tell the samestory; no two historians can. This book is very much the result of my interaction with the oral and written testimony on which it is based. Fortunately for both myself and the reader, however, I did not write it alone. Thomas E. Skidmore worked with me on every page as xi xii Preface he guided this work through its first stages. Charles W. Bergquist's trenchant commentary helped me place the narrative within a wider historical context. I gained a growing sense of the richness of Colombian political history in conversations with Marco Palacios as we both taught Latin American history at the Colegio de Mexico. I have been inspired by William B. Taylor, who helped uncover what the sources were telling me, nudged me to ask additional questions of them, and tried to restrain me from saying more than my work with them would sustain. Yet these pages are mine, and I am responsible for the weaknesses and errors that remain. Many others gave of their time and knowledge. Christopher Mitchell, Richard E. Sharpless, Peter H. Smith, and Alexander W. Wilde were helpful as I was beginning to do research. Steve J. Stern read this work with a discerning eye when it was a dissertation for the University of Wisconsin and offered many valuable suggestions for revision, as did Rodolfo Pastor at the Colegio de Mexico. Areader for the University of Wisconsin Press kept me from many an error. At the University of Virginia, William B. Taylor was joined by Gary D. Allinson, Edward L. Ayers, Dorothy Ross, and Alexander Sedgwick, other colleagues in the History Department, and graduate and undergraduate students, who offered comments and words of encouragement as my work drew to a close. I have been trained in American universities and now teach in the United States. From here the Latin American republics are perceived through many cultural and ideological blinders. Colombia is best known in the United States through the fantastic literature of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a distant world doomed to cyclical devastation. I hope that this story of civilian...