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120 Chapter 4 Conservative had been killed} the army was at that moment driving leftist students from the radio stations} and the riot was confined to the downtown area of Bogota where Gaitan had been shot. Furthermore } Paris learned he was the only governor who had joined the revolutionaries. He reacted to this tum of events indecisively. He withdrew support from the revolutionwy junta} but allowed it to continue operating in his outer office. Deciding to do nothing about the rioting} he said laconically HI would rather pick up broken glass than corpses."87 Late in the afternoon} the cry was raised: HLet's take the penitentiary !" All eyes shifted to the massive} forbidding Pan6ptico of Ibague} located on the northern side of town across the stream called EI Piojo. This regional prison housed more than five hundred inmates} most of them hardened criminals who had been sent to the maximum-security facility from all over central Colombia. It was manned by a corps of guards who were solidly Liberal. When the mob began to assault the main gate} the guards held their fire-understandably because they could see that the attack was directed by municipal police-and in an instant the Pan6ptico fell. At the last moment} several guards tried to resist and died for their trouble. Soon every cell stood open and all 504 inmates were free. When Commander Eugenio Varon Perez tried to halt their flight} a machete-wielding convict split his skull.8s Within hours} the escapees made their presence felt among the civil population . That evening} some of them robbed a bus on its way into town from Rovira} and others raped two campesinas near Mirolindo.89 As the Ibague riot ran its course} the revolutioncuy junta} headed by German Torres Barreto} was hard at work. Understanding the need for department-wide coordination} it dispatched some thirty telegrams to municipios with Liberal majorities advising them to form their own revolutioncuy committees. A moment of comic relief occurred when the man sent to have the messages transmitted} a party hanger-on named Castillo} signed each one HComandante Castillo." Many a local party chief was later chagrined to learn that the HComandante" to whom he swore allegiance that day was none other than HEI Negro Castillo" of Ibague.70 Revolutionary committees promptly sprang up in all Liberal municipios , and in n10st cases they acted responsibly to see that order was maintained. Because they tended to be made up of local political Preface to the Violencia 121 leaders} they were functionally akin to the cabildo abierto of colonial times. Committee members in Chaparral escorted Conservatives outof town under armed guard} and in Libano they not only counseled members of the party to stay inside their homes for protection but also patrolled the streets to see that no acts of violence occurred. On April 11 the revolutionmy committee of Mariquita bragged that} thanks to its leadership} not a single windowpane had been broken and only six Conservatives arrested. A visitor remarked that true revolutionaries would have found cause to arrest more than that number. Annero} twenty-five kilometers south of Mariquita} was the site of the single most atrocious act of the April revolt in Tolima. Located in the midst of rich farmland} much of it owned by absentee landlords} the town was plagued with high unemployment and a large transient population. It was also heavily Liberal. The atmosphere was electric on the nueve de abril. Numerous Liberals heeded the call to revolution emanating from Bogota and vowed to avenge Gaitan's death with blood. The revolutionary committee that was hastily formed began arresting Conservatives en masse and searching their homes for concealed weapons. Many of the revolutionaries believed that tolimense Conservatives possessed large caches of weapons that would soon be used to enforce a sectarian dictatorship over them Uwith blood and fire/' as Ospina's own minister of government had promised six months earlier. The fury and fear of Liberals intensified when a report was received that a Conservative army was marching down from Santa Isabel to fall upon and massacre them} and a heavily armed detachment of volunteers was sent to fortify the banks of the Lagunilla River at the southern edge of town. By late that afternoon} a hundred Conservatives had been rounded up and crammed into the town jail} and the following day another sixty were added to that number.71 A sense of fear and uncertainty continued to hover over Annero the following day...

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