Jorge eliecer gaitan
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala (Bogotá, January 23, 1903 - ibidem, April 9, 1948), known as The Leader of the People or El Caudillo Liberal, was a Colombian jurist, writer, professor, speaker and politician, member and leader of the Colombian Liberal Party. He is considered the most influential politician in Colombia at the end of the 40s and is one of the most important figures in the country's history.
Illustrious graduate of the Faculty of Law of the National University of Colombia. He was rector of the Free University between 1936 and 1939, of which, in addition, he would be a professor of Criminal Law from 1931 until his death. He also stands out as mayor of the city of Bogotá. During the last years of his life he was the sole leader of liberalism.
Gaitán also contributed to the founding of alternative communication media, such as the newspaper Jornada, founded with his friend Luis David Peña, a Bogota native who accompanied Gaitán in the ministries he held.
He served as mayor of Bogotá in 1936, was head of two ministries (Education in 1940 and Labor in 1944) and congressman for various periods between 1929 and 1948. He was a dissident presidential candidate of the Liberal Party in the 1946 elections and was followed by For this, due to the resignation of the party sector led by former president Eduardo Santos, he became the sole head of the group, in addition to being the party's official candidate for the 1950 presidential elections (which finally took place in 1949 due to his assassination)..
Gaitán built a reputation as an orator and defender of popular causes, which he consolidated thanks to his interventions in the debate on the Bananeras Massacre of 1928. His assassination would initially produce huge popular protests in Bogotá; known as the Bogotazo, and later at the national level beginning a bloody period in the history of the country known as 'La Violencia'.
The hypotheses about Gaitán's crime have mutated over the years; from the lone assassin theory to the fact that it was the product of an international conspiracy to prevent socialism from coming to power in Colombia. On April 9, 2018, 70 years after Gaitán's assassination, the Colombian Truth Commission (commission created within the framework of the Peace Agreements between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP) announced that it will request the Attorney General's Office to declare the crime a crime against humanity, in order to reopen the investigation into the true causes that motivated.
Biography
Controversies about his birth
There is no consensus on his date of birth, since there are 2 records that date his birth on January 26 and 28, 1903, respectively. Other personal documents such as his passport, his citizenship card and a diploma from the Royal University of Rome date his birth on January 26, 1903.
As for his place of birth, there are several theories; Most historians agree that he was born in Bogotá, but other sources generate controversy, placing his birth in the municipality of Cucunubá in Cundinamarca, near Bogotá.
Early Years
Despite the fact that his father belonged to liberalism and was an active political militant, his family did not enjoy financial stability, so the Gaitáns moved to the Egipto neighborhood (a popular neighborhood in the capital, where the tailor Ambrosio López also lived). Little Jorge grew up amid discomforts and the needs of his neighbors.
He was educated by his mother (who was a teacher), and then he went to the Catholic school of San Vicente de Paul. He then moved to the city of Facatativá where his mother was from, near Bogotá, where she finished her primary studies at the María Gooding school. He studied his high school with a scholarship at the Colegio Simón Araujo, since his father could not continue paying for his education.
However, he finished his school studies at another school, due to getting into controversy with a teacher from that school, and because his poverty made him the target of ridicule from his wealthy classmates. Despite this, it is said that he was a troublesome (albeit brilliant) student and extravagantly dressed, ways in which he liked to attract attention.
Beginnings in politics
Gaitán stood out as a student leader of liberalism. He supported the coalition candidacy of the conservative poet Guillermo Valencia for the 1918 presidential elections, which however was defeated by the pro-government conservatism. Later he was a speaker in the protests against the conservative president Marco Fidel Suárez (the one who defeated Valencia in 1918), in March 1919, protests that would lead to his resignation in 1921. The young journalists Laureano Gómez and Alberto Lleras also participated in these protests. Camargo.
Before Suárez's resignation, the president offered him an embassy in Rome to continue his studies, thanks to the closeness of the teacher Ayala (Gaitán's mother), with the president. However, Gaitán rejected the application, perhaps out of consistency with his support for Valencia's candidacy.
In 1922, he supported the presidential candidacy of war veteran General Benjamín Herrera, who suspiciously lost the elections to another veteran General Pedro Nel Ospina.
Gaitán organized the Rubén Darío literary society and established the Centro Liberal Universitario. That same year he began higher studies at the National University of Bogotá, where he received his doctorate in Law and Political Sciences, on October 29, 1924, with the thesis entitled "Socialist ideas in Colombia". In this work, Gaitán declared himself a socialist and incorporated postulates far from the Marxists in his reading of reality.
Study in Rome
In 1924, Gaitán was elected to his first public office, being a deputy of the Assembly of Cundinamarca, until 1927, the year in which, with the support of his brother Manuel José, he advanced his doctorate in jurisprudence at the Royal University of Rome and in 1927, his thesis "The positive criterion of premeditation", which was Magna Cum Laude, and meant he graduated with honors. He was then lauded and honored with the award named after his closest professor, the Italian lawyer Enrico Ferri, who influenced his stance on criminal law.
Also in Rome, he was influenced by Benito Mussolini, from whom he drew inspiration on his dialectic and the handling he had of the masses during his speeches. It is said that his speeches were inspired by Mussolini, and his ferocity during his marches Gaitán returned to his country in 1928, where he excelled as a talented defense attorney.
Return to Colombiaː The Bananeras Massacre
Once in Colombia, sworn in as a congressman in March 1928, between September 3 and 6, 1929, he led a control debate in Congress due to the murder of an undetermined number of United Fruit Company workers in the Ciénaga region, in the department of Magdalena. The workers demanded decent working conditions (until then non-existent) and fair treatment by their employers.
The massacre of these people is known in the country's history as the "Massacre of the Banana Plants. This gesture earned Gaitán the title of "Tribuno del Pueblo", but also the malicious nickname of "El Negro Gaitán". The harassment to which Congressman Gaitán subjected the conservative president Miguel Abadía Méndez led to the fall of conservatism in the 1930 presidential elections.
Activity in Congress
His social activism catapulted him to fame in liberalism, for which reason its directors decided to launch him as head of the list for the 1929 elections, being elected representative to the chamber. In 1931 he was elected president of the House of Representatives and also worked as a professor of Criminal Law at the National University of Colombia, a position he held between 1936 and 1939. He was also a government delegate to avert the border problem between Colombia and Peru, in 1933.
He was configured as a representative of the middle class and of those who were out of public life, because he united them through his speeches charged with emotion and illusion. He also criticized the "convivialist" order, where politics was practiced in closed circles, that is, that only a few personalities decided the future of the country, where the oligarchy that kept every sphere of society dominated was concentrated. life in the country.
Separation and return to liberalism
The concessions made by President Enrique Olaya Herrera to the conservatives and the UFC led to Gaitán separating from liberalism in 1933 and founding, together with the lawyer Carlos Arango Vélez, the political movement Unión Nacional de Izquierda Revolucionaria (UNIR) and its journalistic organ "El Unirismo", which he dissolved a short time later to join the Liberal Party, from where he raised the need for agrarian reform. Despite his affinity with the communists, Gaitán was not interested in their anti-capitalist postulates.
The harassment suffered by unirismo and the electoral failure of the movement in 1935 led Gaitán and Arango to return to liberalism that same year.
Bogota City Hall (1936-1937)
On May 20, 1936, the governor of Cundinamarca, Parmenio Cárdenas, appointed him Mayor of Bogotá. Seduced by the traditional leaders of the Liberal Party, Gaitán took office on June 8, 1936. His short tenure as mayor, however, was not silent, and he was nicknamed The mayor of the town .
He advanced social reforms, promoted the municipalization of public services and tried to establish restaurants or school canteens, and sports days that encouraged physical activity in the city, all with a focus on the less favored in the city, to Unlike the progressive measures of the national government, which did not have that motivation.
Gaitán supported culture in the city, promoting free concerts, creating mobile libraries and civic days dedicated to reading and childhood. He in fact inaugurated the first Bogotá Book Fair (called the Popular Book Fair), on October 10, 1936 (which is currently held in August). The success of the fair led to similar events across the country, including the 1988 International Book Fair.
Controversies and removal
His opponents also claimed that with his measures of physical activity and acculturation of the population, he resembled the fascist measures of conditioning of the civilian population. Gaitán always denied his ties to fascism, as he said that he only wanted to dignify the lives of the people of Bogotá, despite the fact that he was a well-known admirer of Musolinni.
Decisions that made him immensely unpopular were the measures he took to beautify the city, since the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city was approaching, and Gaitán considered that the city was devastated by old facades and streets dirty. By means of a decree, Gaitán ordered the property owners to paint the facades of the buildings with their income, and with colors chosen by the mayor himself.
By making sure that the people of Bogotá paid for the repairs, Gaitán wanted to create civic culture and generate spending austerity for the allocation of resources to the city's culture and education. He also forced companies with chimneys to install filters to not contaminate the air of the city, and companies to install fire extinguishers. He took beggars and abandoned children off the streets and forced them into centers for their rehabilitation and care.
He also fell out with academics, ironic considering his educational and cultural measures. The reason for their enmity was given because in 1936, the academic Jorge Álvarez Lleras, requested the relocation of a commemorative plaque of the Prussian scientist Alexander Von Humboldt, from the Old Astronomical Observatory of the city (near the Casa de Nariño), to the headquarters of the Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, of which Álvarez was a member. Gaitán claimed that the plaque was designed to be on the site and did not authorize its removal.
Other of his initiatives did not enjoy popular approval, such as making bathing compulsory, prohibiting the use of ruanas and espadrilles, and uniforming shoeshine boys and taxi drivers, and requiring a taxi meter regulated by the mayor's office to the latter, who with a strike and road blockade on February 8, 1937, pressured their dismissal, which took place on February 14, 1937, less than six months after taking office. His measures to uniform the workers were reversed when his successor, Gonzalo Restrepo, took office.
It is claimed that the pressure from the strikers was given with the support of the Conservative Party, and a rumor circulated among his family that President López himself was the one who encouraged Gaitán's dismissal, since he wanted to stop Gaitán's political rise, whom the militants of liberalism were already beginning to see as presidential for the next electoral elections. Conservatives also began to fear him, accusing him of being a populist.
As former mayor of Bogotá, Gaitán nominated and supported the presidential candidacy of lawyer Darío Echandía, in opposition to official liberalism, which he again renounced in 1937. Echandía was defeated by the moderate sector of liberalism, which gave victory to the journalist Eduardo Santos Montejo.
Ministry of Education (1940-1941) and Labor (1943-1944)
On February 1, 1940, President Santos appointed him Minister of Education of Colombia. Gaitán undertook a nationwide literacy campaign, introduced free school shoes, school restaurants (a measure that he could not implement in his short tenure as mayor of Bogotá), the traveling educational cinema, the massive cultural outreach, and started the Salón National of Artists. He also promoted a comprehensive reform of Colombian education, but Congress rejected his project.
In 1942, he joined the presidential campaign of his old collaborator Carlos Arango, who wanted to sabotage the re-election attempt of former President López, but liberalism turned to supporting López, who was re-elected president.
In 1943, he was called back to the governmentː The president in charge Darío Echandía (who replaced López with a license) appointed him Minister of Labor, Hygiene and Social Welfare (today the Ministries of Labor and Health), on October 8, 1943. Gaitán remained in office until March 6, 1944. In the ministry, Gaitán drew up a bill to improve workers' working conditions, after inspecting the companies on the banks of the Magdalena River, but again the Congress vetoed his reform.
Presidential candidacy
In an event of disagreements and political segregations, the Liberal Party was divided into two ideological factions to participate in the 1946 elections; on the one hand, "the directoristas", the official sector of the party and promoter of the candidacy of ex-minister Gabriel Turbay (file of ex-president Santos), and "the Gaitanistas", dissidents of the party, promoters of Gaitán's candidacy and supported by the popular sectors, being more inclined to the left of the party.
The party authorities themselves did nothing to ward off the schismː President Lleras refused to interfere in the elections, former President López did not want to intervene to seek unity, and ex-designate Echandía, who was offered to be the candidate of the liberal unit refused to run for office.
Among his government proposals for 1946, he was negotiating peace and ending violence in the country, trying to form a unity government with both parties and legalizing political minorities, financing social improvements proclaimed by the proletariat, such as working conditions rights, union privileges, and social and health insurance.
The liberal division was taken advantage of by the Conservative Party, which had been eagerly seeking to regain power since it lost it in 1930. The conservatives nominated businessman Mariano Ospina Pérez (grandson and nephew of former conservative presidents). In the end, the Liberals could not prevent Ospina from winning the elections, and despite his victory, it is considered that this was Gaitán's political platform, who without machinery for his campaign subtracted votes from the Liberal ruling party.
Post candidacy and last years
In the 1947 legislative elections, the Liberal Party, although divided between the two political currents, achieved an undisputed majority in the Senate (35 liberal senators "22 gaitanistas-13 directoristas" and 28 conservatives) and in the Chamber (74 liberal representatives "44 gaitanistas-30 directoristas" and 57 for conservatives). On October 24, 1947, Gaitán was proclaimed sole leader of the Liberal Party, defeating Eduardo Santos.
At the beginning of 1948, when the news of the massacre of several Liberals in several towns in the country at the hands of Conservatives became known, Gaitán organized several marches with massive attendance, among which are known the "March of the Torches" and the "March of Silence"; In the latter, he raised a prayer to President Ospina to help stop the violence and allow a few hours of silence for the victims, during which only flags and banners moved by the wind were heard.
On April 1, 1948, he received the title of doctor honoris causa in Political and Social Sciences from the Free University. Upon Turbay's death, Gaitán was named the sole leader of liberalism.
Defense lawyer for the soldier accused of the murder of a journalist
On April 8, 1948, one day before his murder, he presented his last judicial defense: the acquittal of Conservative lieutenant Jesús María Cortés, a soldier accused of the murder of the first working journalist in Colombia, Eudoro Galarza Ossa. & #34;Gaitán assumed the defense of Lieutenant Cortés Poveda, and his judicial thesis was based on the fact that the officer acted simply in legitimate defense of his sullied honor. With more oratory than legal arguments, on April 9, 1948 he achieved the acquittal of his client. That would be his last performance as a criminal.& # 34;
Murder
On April 8, 1948, after defending Lieutenant Cortés in court until late at night, Gaitán rested and left at noon on Friday the 9th—invited to lunch by Plinio Mendoza Neira—in the company of several friends from the Agustín Nieto building. (his workplace) to have lunch at the Continental Hotel while waiting for several meetings he would have that day. On his agenda, for the afternoon of the day of his assassination, he had scheduled meetings, among others, with the young Cuban student leader Fidel Castro and with the Venezuelan politician Rómulo Betancourt.
A man (apparently Juan Roa Sierra or others) was waiting for him at the entrance of the building and shot him with a revolver, causing fatal injuries. Gaitán was taken to the Central Clinic, where he died around 2:05 pm Roa, for his part, was lynched, tied up with ties on Carrera Séptima and dragged to Plaza de Bolívar.
From then on, the crowd grew in a matter of minutes; Faced with the army's response, the spontaneous entrenched themselves waiting for the orders of the liberal leaders, who intended to meet with President Mariano Ospina Pérez. As the afternoon wore on, the mob became more armed, storming hardware stores and police stations, where some officers surrendered their weapons to save their lives.
The defense of the Palacio de La Carrera (name of the current Casa de Nariño) by the Presidential Guard and unidentified snipers, located in the tallest buildings near the palace, including the churches, prevented the crowd from entering the place where the president was A possible delay in taking action by those driving the tanks would have made it easier for the demonstrators to enter the palace, since the Guard was running out of ammunition.
The crowd gave way to the five war tanks that were directed to the place, as he believed that they were supporting his cause and, most likely, they were, until the moment the colonel who commanded them was assassinated, shortly before reaching the palace.. Once in the square, the tanks turned and fired into the crowd, massacring around 300 people.
Two former agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) affirm in the book "The Invisible Government" (The Invisible Government) the participation of the US intelligence agency in the murder of Gaitán, a version that the Cuban government ratified in 2005 with a documentary called "Operation Pantomime". This was the name of the alleged assassination operation according to one of the former agents, John Mepples Spirito, who was captured in 1961 in Cuba. The documentary shows interviews with the then imprisoned Spirito. No other evidence has emerged to corroborate these allegations.
The assassination provoked a violent popular reaction with its corresponding government repression known as "El Bogotazo", which destroyed 142 buildings in the center of Bogotá.[1] The violence caused by the assassination was not concentrated only in the capital, also in important cities near Bogotá such as Zipaquirá. The municipalities and regions with "gaitanistas" they reacted in the same or greater proportion and, in cases like Barrancabermeja, the situation lasted for more than a month.
Later, the death of Gaitán and the Bogotazo, would trigger long-term bipartisan confrontations that would spread to other regions of the country for the next 10 years, known as "La Violencia", a bloody era of vandalism and massacres between conservatives and liberals, thus marking the murder of Gaitán a before and after for the history of Colombia.
Family
Jorge Elíecer Gaitán was not a member of the Colombian elites, like the vast majority of his colleagues in the Liberal Party, despite the fact that his surnames coincided with those of other liberal politicians, such as Otálora (his second father), and Ayala (his mother's first).
Gaitán was the son of the radical liberal politician Elíecer Gaitán Otálora (whose first name came from Extremadura), who after failing in various trades dedicated himself to selling books, and his wife, the famous teacher Manuela Ayala Beltrán. His brothers were Manuel José and Rafael Gaitán Ayala.
Marriage and offspring
Gaitán married Amparo Jaramillo in Medellín, with whom he had his only daughter, the left-wing activist, progressive politician, lawyer and diplomat Gloria Gaitán Jaramillo. Educated in Switzerland, thanks to her father's diplomatic assignments, and because of the studies he carried out abroad, Gloria became close to the communist movements, consolidating her affinity with the murder of her father.
Gaitán married the communist militant Luis Emiro Valencia, with whom she had her two daughters, María and Catalina Valencia Gaitán. Separated from Valencia in 1971, she was an economic adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende, whom she met in Cuba in 1959, with whom she had an affair and from which a child was born that was never born.
Legacy and Tributes
The figure of Gaitán remains valid today in Colombia in the monuments with his image that exist in various towns in the country, to the point of being the second historical figure with the most monuments and tributes in the country, only surpassed by the liberator of Colombia Simón Bolívar.
The municipality of Puerto Gaitán in Meta and the township of Gaitania in Planadas (Tolima) were named in his honor, the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater in the historic center of Bogotá and numerous monuments, such as busts of him in various public institutions, or his well-known residence, converted into the Jorge Eliecer Gaitán House Museum
Throughout the country, there are parks, schools and neighborhoods in almost all municipalities that bear the names and surnames of the liberal leader. The song A la carga, by Pacho Galán, was a tribute that was played in the places the political leader frequented.
In 1965, coins of 20 and 50 cents with his bust were minted and issued, and a commemorative bill of 1000 Colombian pesos, was printed and circulated between 2001 and 2016, has images and phrases of Gaitán:
"I am not a man I am a people," "The people are superior to their leaders."Jorge Eliécer Gaitán
In 1984, the miniseries El Bogotazo was broadcast on Colombian television, based on the work El Bogotazo: Memorias del olvido (1983) by Arturo Alape. Gaitán was played by actor Edgardo Román.
Gaitan's Tomb (Museum House and National Exploratory)
As a form of protest, Gaitán's relatives refused to take his remains to a cemetery until the government of the day fell. Amparo Jaramillo, Gaitán's widow, assured that the murder of her husband had been part of a conspiracy between the spheres of conservatism, with the complicity of liberal leaders. However, the political leaders reached an agreement with Jaramillo and decided to bury her body in the living room of the house where she lived.
On April 9, 1988, Gaitán's remains were transferred to the so-called Patio de la Tierra, which is part of the National Exploratory project. The coffin was carried, among others, by then-president Virgilio Barco. His body is standing upright and, although the brain and heart are not buried there, they do remain in the museum's catalogue.The remains of Gaitán's mother and wife are buried in the same courtyard.
The Gaitan tombstone, made in circular form and with a plant in the center, establishes its year of birth, but not that of its death; instead appears the symbol of infinite (∞ ∞ {displaystyle infty }), in sign of the continuation of his legacy and his ideals.
In the 1980s, the architect Rogelio Salmona designed the building that will house the "National Exploratorium," a complex architectural project directed by Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the political leader, who has dedicated herself to carry on his father's legacy. The project, as of 2018, is not fully built and its completion is uncertain.
Works
- Socialist ideas in Colombia (1924). Reissue 1988 by Centro Cultural Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Bogotá. ISBN 9589501125
- Gaitan: Anthology of His Economic and Social Thought (1968). Editorial South America. Bogota.
- The Debate on Bananas (1988) Centro Cultural Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Bogotá. ISBN 9589501133