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

Introduction

Introduction This is the story of the violent death of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, and of the crazed, fleeting passions of the crowd that took to the streets of Bogota, Colombia, on the afternoon of April 9, 1948, to avenge his murder. In a few hours downtown Bogota was in flames, its public buildings bombed and ransacked, its stores looted. I chose to study the bogotazo, as the riot has come to be known, to remove myself from the conventions of macrohistorical, social science-dominated thinking about the Latin American past and future. I had grown distrustful of the many models through which scholars of various political persuasions deduced the causes of Latin American tradition and backwardness. These models pointed to inevitable decay, continuous stagnation, or a telescoping of history into a socialist future, and often told us more about scholars' preconceptions than about the history of the Latin American people. I therefore decided to study something exceptional, and small, in order to learn about what then seemed to be significant deviations in a teleological process. By looking at Colombian history through an accidental and unpredictable event, I came to perceive historical patterns that are not contained in the traditional dichotomies of developed and underdeveloped, advanced and dependent, societies. Historians have passed the riot by. Throughout my youth I heard quiet rumors that the riot had split the nation's history in two. I wished to give life 3 4 Introduction to the rioters, not necessarily by justifying their actions, but by giving them a place in the history of Colombia. For the crowd of the bogotazo has been dismissed as an expression of a barbarous underside of Colombian society. Elias Canetti's anthropologically informed work provided many insights into its behavior.1 The realization came quickly, however, that I was in for a long haul on a short subject. The more people I interviewed and talked to in Bogota, the less comprehensible the events became. It was not the behavior of the crowd that confounded me. What seemed bizarre were the actions of the politicians on that afternoon and evening. Tobetter understand them and Gaitan, I draw on Alexander Wilde's rich study of Colombian politics and on Richard Sharpless 's thorough biography of Gaitan.2 Although the behavior of the politicians is placed within a wider cultural and economic context in these pages, and Gaitan is not portrayed as either a populist or a socialist, both works were instrumental in shaping this study. The politicians of Colombia compelled me, through their beliefs and their behavior, to look to the culture through which they, Gaitan among them, explained their reality. I seek to bring them, also, to life in these pages. Historians who have searched among cultural and behavioral changes for explanations of the Latin American past are close to my concerns. Too often, however, they perceive too little change, and their writings have a deterministic hue. They derive individual and collective behavior from a pervasive Catholic and Iberian tradition whose paternalistic and corporatist strands tend to envelop Latin America in hierarchical and authoritarian societies.S Too often, also, those who concern themselves with the political culture of Latin America do so with pity for its alleged irrationality. Latin Americans are seen as acting within narrow personalistic circles rather than in the broad aggregates where the objective, social needs of society can best be fulfilled. The masses are apathetic, distrustful of leaders and alienated from society. A major college textbook describes a culture without political participation, plagued by a "client population yearning to receive benefitsfrom the government , but unable, short of rebellion, to modify local conditions."4 Mauricio Solaun sees the Colombian political culture we will be studying as imbued with a "traditional normlessness," "familism," "friendism," and a distrust of others that can only lead to violence.5 According to James Payne, the politicians of Colombia pursue personal and political "status" with an abiding disregard for the social and economic conditions of their society, while the nation's people seek political affiliations for the narrow prospects of employment rather than from a commitment to ideology, political programs, or class interests.6 According to Glen Caudill Dealy, there is an underlying rationality to Latin American and other Catholic societies, but it is antithetical to the Introduction 5 private rationality of economically enterprising individuals. He argues that these societies cannot pass through a bourgeois-capitalist stage of history because they...