Laureano gomez
Laureano Eleuterio Gómez Castro (Bogotá, February 20, 1889-ibid., July 13, 1965), called by his supporters The Tempest Man, El Tribuno del Siglo XX , El Monstruo, and by his liberal adversaries such as El Basilisco, was a Colombian engineer, journalist, diplomat and politician, militant and leader of the Colombian Conservative Party.
Gómez was for three decades one of the most prominent leaders of the Conservative Party and considered one of Colombia's most eminent orators. He is a controversial figure in Colombian history to this day. He had binary stances that left no room for nuance. His nationalism, mixed with a pre-conciliar, orthodox and conservative Catholic thought, brought him closer to Spanish national-Catholicism with which he maintained a certain agreement.
As a politician and journalist, he was always engaged in strong and angry dialectical confrontations, in which he even forced ministers and presidents to resign. This virulence in the debate did not exclude people inside and outside of his own party, with whom he had conflicts. However, he was the leader of the conservatism between 1933 and 1953, the time in which the so-called Liberal Republic passed, thus leading the opposition bloc, and the time in which he was also elected president in 1949, within a campaign in which he was the only candidate, since the Liberals did not present candidates alleging security problems, due to the proliferation of La Violencia that had plagued Colombia since 1925.
He only lasted a year as acting president, due to health problems that led him to retire, as well as the 1953 coup d'état, which would overthrow him.
Upon his return to the country, in the twilight of the government of the Military Junta, he made an agreement from exile and together with the former liberal president Alberto Lleras Camargo the National Front with the aim of putting an end to La Violencia.
He is considered one of the ideologues of the Colombian extreme right, as well as being reproached for his closeness to Francoism, his authoritarianism and his racist, anti-Semitic and elitist positions, as well as for being one of the instigators of La Violencia by the wing conservative.
He was the father of the leader, journalist, jurist and conservative intellectual Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, who was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency three times, and was one of the architects of the progressive Constitution of 1991.
Biography
He was born in Bogotá on February 20, 1889, in a wealthy middle-class, conservative and Catholic home, originally from Ocaña (Norte de Santander). On April 15, he was baptized in the Church of San Agustín, by the influential Colombian Catholic priest Carlos Cortés Lee.
At the age of 8, he entered the Colegio de San Bartolomé, run by the Jesuit fathers, which allowed him, when he graduated from high school, to study civil engineering at the National University, graduating at the age of 20, on July 19, 1909. He began working in the company in charge of the construction of the Antioquia railway but would soon leave his position to found and become director of the newspaper La Unidad, on October 2 of that same year. From this newspaper he would make a virulent criticism of many situations and characters in national public life, which would earn him the fear of many as a forceful inspector of social morality.
Beginnings in politics
In 1909, while still in college, he joined the youth of the Conservative Party. From the beginning he was critical of his own party. Thus, he opposed the government of Rafael Reyes Prieto, due to the lack of guarantees from his government, defending the ousted Vice President Ramón González Valencia.In the end, General Rafael Reyes was forced to resign.
By 1911, he was a representative to the Chamber and deputy of the Departmental Assembly of Cundinamarca, apart from convening from his newspaper the first National Eucharistic Congress of 1913, attending as a delegate of the Departmental Assembly of Antioquia. Between that year and 1916 he was a representative to the Chamber for the second time, despite the fact that his election was annulled due to the lack of age to hold office, in accordance with the Constitution. In 1915 Gómez entered into controversy with the Bogota archbishop Bernardo Herrera Restrepo.
He stood out as a strong opponent of his fellow party, President Marco Fidel Suárez since 1918. In this contest he would ally himself with his friend, the liberal Alfonso López Pumarejo. requested a permanent license from Congress, leaving the second designated Jorge Holguín in charge of the presidency, who had already been appointed between 1909 and 1910, due to the resignation of his co-partisan Rafael Reyes. He also launched attacks against Suárez's failed cabinet.
In 1923 he was appointed by President Pedro Nel Ospina as plenipotentiary minister in Chile, where he participated in the V Pan-American Conference, and that same year he was appointed ambassador to Argentina. In 1925 he returned to assume the position of minister of public works, where he used the money from the United States indemnity for the Separation of Panama to carry out a series of large-scale works.
Later, he had a stint in the Senate that would make him famous, but he himself was uncomfortable for the Conservative Party itself. After this, he took a brief recess from public life, but in the meantime, he stars, along with Alfonso López Pumarejo, the famous conferences of the Municipal Theater, in which he promoted the end of the Conservative Hegemony. He understood that his party had taken an incorrect ideological and moral turn and that it had to purify itself.
The rise of totalitarianism
Within the Conservative Party, the Leopards group arose in 1920, an admirer of Charles Maurras and fascism: although the fascism they sought was Catholic, Laureano saw in this thought a threat to the Republic, he had already been critical of the Nazi Regime, as also of Mussolini even before the Second World War, which is why he formed the group of the Civilistas, which faced the fascists within the Conservative Party. This is attested by his book El cuadrilátero de 1935 in which he attacks Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin, and praises the political strategy of Mahatma Gandhi. About Hitler and his expansionist regime he says:
Hitler is not a great man. By the door of the crime, Germany will not pass to the dominion of humanity, for all men, Germans or not, who do not want to be slaves (...), who love the right for what he gives them and for what he represents for the human species.
In 1930, the liberal president Enrique Olaya Herrera appointed him plenipotentiary minister in Germany, where he was able to observe the gradual rise of Adolf Hitler, which made him know first-hand the ideology of Nazism.
Return to Colombia
However, it was from 1932, two years after the start of the so-called Liberal Republic, which would last 16 years, when Gómez resigned from the embassy in Germany and accused President Enrique Olaya Herrera of reinitiating political violence in Colombia, which, according to Gómez, had not been seen since the Thousand Days' War. He also denounced "lentejismo" with some conservatives bribed by "gajes and vile farms" to neutralize the conservative majority in Congress, as was recorded in the memorable debates of 1932, which definitively catapulted Gómez to the forefront of national life..
In the 1930s, he was a deputy in several departmental assemblies (Santander, Antioquia) and a senator between 1931 and 1935. An anecdote about this stage of his life happened in 1935, when he was going to debate against the then foreign minister and former president Olaya Herrera on the Rio Protocol, which put an end to the border problem with Peru, which had been going on since the beginning of the decade. Gómez was set to duel Olaya, but his fellow congressman, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, noticed that Gómez was having trouble staying on his feet, who eventually passed out from a thrombosis. Obviously the debate could not take place.
In 1936 he founded the newspaper El Siglo, a strong critic of liberal policies, especially those of his old ally Alfonso López Pumarejo. Neither did Eduardo Santos and his finance minister Lleras Restrepo escape his relentless criticism. On September 15, 1940, in a radio speech broadcast by Radio Nacional, verbal threats were made between the parties and by Gómez against the government of Eduardo Santos and the governments of Alfonso López Pumarejo:
“We will reach the intrepid action and the personal attack... and we will make the Republic invivible!” It is the regime of the threat (...) Civil war if the chosen candidate is not satisfactory for conservatism. Civil war if the 1936 constitution is not repealed. Civil war if the guarantees to the workers of Colombia are not ended. Civil war if it is not left, at last, that the conservative party governs the republic to its craving (...) The civil war won't be won by the conservatives without doing it. We don't give anything to a threat. Not by boasting, not by ferocity, or by stubbornness, but because a republic becomes invivible when the extortioners become masters”Laureano Gómez (1940)
Under Gómez's aegis during the liberal period, the Conservative Party abstained from participating in the 1934 and 1938 presidential elections, since it had gained control of the party as a whole as its director. In 1942 he supported the liberal dissident Carlos Arango Vélez, and before the division of liberalism for the 1946 elections, he ran for Mariano Ospina Pérez, after Gómez declined the possibility of leading the candidacy knowing that it would cause the immediate union of liberals and conservatives.
Gómez's platform during these years was markedly racist. From his newspaper El Siglo he gave harsh comments against Jewish immigrants in Colombia. His anti-Semitism would continue to exacerbate, in 1942 he led a plebiscite to expel these Jews; everything would reach its peak in 1946 when the Colombian Conservative Party, headed by Laureano Gómez and Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, who were rivals within the party, incited their supporters to throw stones at the businesses of Jewish merchants, similar to the night of Broken Glass. However, this incident was able to calm down without going too far.
Gómez would also launch racist speeches against indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, declaring in 1930 that «our race comes from the mixture of Spaniards, Indians and blacks. The last two inheritance flows are stigmas of complete inferiority". He accuses the blacks of being liars and childish:
The spirit of black, rudimentary and report, as it remains in perpetual infantility. The brute of an eternal illusion envelops it and the prodigious gift of lying is the manifestation of that false image of things, of the oath that produces it the spectacle of the world, of the terror of being abandoned and diminished in the human concert.
He attributes malice, insignificance and defeatism to indigenous populations:
The other wild race, the indigenous race of the American land, the second of the barbarian elements of our civilization, has transmitted to its descendants the turkey of its maturity. In the grudge of the defeat, he seems to have taken refuge in the tacit dissipulo and insincer and malicious cazurreria. It affects a complete indifference for the palpitations of national life, seems resigned to misery and insignificance. It is narcotized by the sadness of the desert, intoxicated with the melancholy of its moors and forests
In 1944, while a senator, he was accused of planning the attempted coup against President López Pumarejo. For this reason he had to leave the country and take refuge in Brazil. He criticized the universal vote that he considers "contradictory with the hierarchical nature of society". In the government of Mariano Ospina Pérez he was Minister of External relationships.
The Bogotazo and resurgence of violence
With Jorge Eliécer Gaitán she had a confrontational relationship, but within his dialectical style. To the point that both published their debates in their newspaper El Siglo. But his postures were forceful. This is how he spoke about Gaitán in a radio interview granted to journalist Eduardo Caballero Calderón on July 9, 1946:
Regarding the movement headed by Dr. Gaitan, we must distinguish. Dr. Gaitan is inspired by a high fervour of social justice, for a desire to improve the less fortunate. That's what I'm doing. But that feeling that could be said to be vertebral of his performance is accompanied by other things that I disagree with, especially with the procedure. On some occasion, I had the opportunity to tell him personally the importance of the use of tumultary violence as a weapon or as an element of political activity. I spoke with him after Cali's events against Dr. Gabriel Turbay, and I expressed to him in the most express way that I had fought all my life for freedom, and that I consider deeply harmful and detrimental to the true enjoyment of freedom, that I wish for Colombia, to establish a tumultary violence that selects those who can go to a public forum to say their opinions.
In 1947, Gómez declared from Spain:
“I think civil war is inevitable, God wants us to win it...”Laureano Gómez (1947)
The opposition accused him of fanning, with his fiery speeches, the flame of violence and of being one more caudillo in the war and behind the paramilitary forces of his time.
In 1948 Gómez presided over the IX Pan-American Conference in Bogotá, as Foreign Minister of Colombia. At that moment, on April 9, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated, unleashing a wave of violence throughout the city of Bogotá, as well as throughout the country. These disturbances were given the name of El Bogotazo. According to the writer Gabriel García Márquez, an eyewitness to the events of the Bogotazo, Gómez took refuge in the Military School for Cadets, from where he apparently communicated by telephone with Ospina, preventing the government from negotiating with the revolutionaries at all costs. The mobs quickly pointed to the Conservative Party as responsible for the assassination and especially its leader Laureano Gómez. Given this, the latter had to go into exile in Spain. His house in Fontibón, as well as the headquarters of his newspaper El Siglo were set on fire and destroyed.
He returned to the country, through Medellín, on June 25, 1949. In the Plaza de Berrío he was received by thousands of citizens. There he launched his famous & # 34; The Basilisk & # 34; speech, in which he called liberalism a wild beast with a communist head. Liberals would later use this moniker to disqualify him.
Candidacy and presidential elections of 1949
Following a liberal-led constitutional reform, the 1950 elections were moved up to November 1949.
On October 12, 1949, the Conservative Party elected Laureano Gómez as its presidential candidate. However, when the elections arrived, Gómez was the only candidate registered for the presidential elections. One of the candidates who wanted to rival Gómez, the liberal and former president Darío Echandía, decided to resign from the candidacy arguing that there were no security guarantees for his party or his person, after a wave of murders (in which his own brother fell, Vicente Echandía) and because of the chaos that was increasing in the country in those days. Gómez, having no opponent in the elections, obtained the historic vote of 1 million votes, which for the time was a true milestone.
President of Colombia (1950-1951; 1953)
Gómez took office on August 7, 1950, being the only president to date to take office before the president of the Supreme Court of Justice Domingo Sarasty, since legal tradition indicated that the oath was taken by the president congressional. This particularity occurred due to the closure of Congress in 1949 by order of Ospina Pérez. His tenure in office has been one of the shortest, due to his sick leave and the 1953 coup that toppled him.
During his government, violence escalated, generating considerable political instability. Faced with this, Gómez offered the Liberal Party a joint government, but it refused. Within the same conservatism, a movement more akin to Ospina Pérez began to take shape, thus taking away Gómez's hegemony. He also invited this faction to join the government, receiving the same refusal.
He kept the country in a state of siege, restricted the rights of its citizens and advocated maintaining the privileges of the Catholic Church.
His government was marked by the unsuccessful call for a constitutional reform project with a markedly conservative program. With his will to establish corporatism, in the best style of what was initially proposed by Spanish national syndicalism. In the same way, he proposed a clear separation of powers, but gave special powers to the executive for times of crisis that were called by his opposition as a & # 34; civil dictatorship & # 34;.
Another issue that marked the conservatism of his government was his intention to renew the concordats that liberalism had repealed, as well as to maintain the presence of the Catholic Church in public and political life.
Economy and public works
During his government, he created Banco Popular, created the Colombian Petroleum Company (Ecopetrol), created the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum and the Ministry of Public Works, in turn suppressing the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. He also began the construction of the pipelines between Puerto Berrío and Medellín, and between Bogotá and Puerto Salgar. He advanced works on the campus of the National University of Colombia.
Economically, the Currie Mission of the World Bank was central, creating a national planning board, with the objective of expanding the local and international market. Its objective was to get Colombia out of underdevelopment.
Public order and security
During his government, there was an increase in violence with the spread of the conservative paramilitary groups known as the chulavitas and the birds, backed by the Military Forces, confronting the liberals who formed the liberal guerrillas and the self-defense groups of the Party Colombian Communist. The policy of the government of Laureano Gómez was characterized by being openly anti-communist. Massive displacements from the countryside to the city were generated. There was an increase in religious persecution against Protestants.
During his government, the actions of the Political Police (Popol) and the Colombian Intelligence Service (SIC) stood out, a secret force of the regime to which murders, torture and disappearances of liberals and opponents are attributed.
According to his newspaper El Siglo, his government, together with the liberal leader and friend Alfonso López Pumarejo, sought to negotiate the demobilization of the liberal guerrillas of the eastern Llanos, sending his government minister, the former president of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, Domingo Sarasty to talk with them.
Relationship with the Catholic Church
Laureano Gómez was a combative Catholic. A man who practiced apologetics and who was founded on a resounding pre-conciliar Christian philosophy. His mind was inquisitive and articulated in a binary that admitted only black or white, good or evil, truth or lie, but never nuances. Peace, in this way, could only be the peace of good, everything else came to be evil or chaos. And where was that good? In the Church, outside of it there is no salvation. Thus, he had declared in 1942, in the Senate:
I speak on behalf of the principles of Catholic doctrine, which are expressed in the philosophical works of St. Thomas, which says how a State should be organized.
According to Gómez, the good state organization is found in the Scholastic and in Tomás de Aquino. In this context, he wanted to resume the relations between Church and State, which had been so weakened during the period of the Liberal Republic (between 1930-1946), despite the clear religious spirit found in the Constitution of 1886.
Likewise, she had to give in to the Catholic women's movements, which sought to grant Colombian women the vote. The Marian collectives managed to have the vote recognized at the local, but not national, level until 1957.
Foreign Policy
He maintained a nationalist, populist and anti-communist discourse. The US government considered him close to Francisco Franco. Gómez had been a staunch opponent of Marco Fidel Suárez, one of his criticisms being the negotiation that led to the loss of Panama. Nor were his protectionist and interventionist policies very well regarded, in opposition to the interests of Washington D.C.
In 1950, his government received the Currie Mission, from the World Bank in 1950, directed by Lauchlin Currie. In May 1951, he sent the Colombia Battalion, as a sign of the anti-communist policy of the Colombian government, to support South Korea South and the United States during the Korean War. Colombia was the only Latin American country to participate in that conflict. The unit returned to Colombia on June 27, 1953, days after Gómez was overthrown by Rojas Pinilla. The Gómez government signed the Bilateral Military Pact with the United States on April 17, 1952.
Retirement and government of Urdaneta
In late October 1951, Gomez suffered two heart attacks. His illness weakened his health and forced him to retire from office. In his replacement, the appointed Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez assumed office, who took office on November 5, 1951 before Congress. Despite his delicate state of health, Gómez continued to influence the government through Urdaneta.
Government Crisis
In one of his maneuvers, Gómez promoted a National Constituent Assembly, through which he wanted to adopt a corporate regime similar to the pro-fascist (National-Corporativist) model of Spain of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, or to the Portuguese corporate regime. This one tried to ignore the freedom of the press, the veto to the benefits of the Catholic Church, and would be invested with powers to legislate over the military forces, leaving these subject to the presidency and not to Congress, some authors called this proposal &# 34;civil dictatorship".
Throughout the constituent process, which was finally interrupted by the coup d'état of June 13, 1953, Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, son of the President of the Republic who later became his natural successor in power, had an active intellectual participation. the party and of and Jorge Leyva Urdaneta. However, the project did not receive the support of his party, since the faction led by Gilberto Alzate was beginning to be a majority in the party, and his presidential candidacy was vetoed by Gómez. Consequently, Mariano Ospina Pérez supported the June military coup.
Overthrow (1953)
Faced with the continuous collapse of public order due to the opposition's constant complaints about abuses, the massacres committed by the ruling party in rural and urban areas, and the fear of a military coup, Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez, the person in charge of the Presidency, tried to prevent the fall of the government in the hands of the military. Gómez ordered Urdaneta to remove General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla from his position, who had only returned from Washington in 1952 as a military attaché. Despite this, Gómez tried to depose Rojas on several occasions, while the soldier lived in the United States to replace him with a soldier similar to his ideas.
The conservatives with Mariano Ospina and Gilberto Álzate were already allied with the liberals and with some businessmen who were dissatisfied with the economic policies of the government, as well as with the Church, to depose the president. This coalition induced the military coup headed by General Gustavo Rojas Pìnilla. Gomez was seen. climbing the stairs of the plane that would take him to exile with the only company of his friend Vicente Casas Castañeda who carried an umbrella.
The coup took place on June 13, 1953 when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla became president in what has been called a coup of opinion, due to the sectors that supported him, and the peaceful succession that occurred.
Post-government
National Front
In his exile in Spain, Laureano Gómez continued to lead the conservatives and as head of the party signed the Benidorm Pact on July 24, 1956 with the leader of liberalism Alberto Lleras Camargo, against the military regime. Lleras had been commissioned to Benidorm as a leader of liberalism, since he was the only liberal who could convince Gómez of the need for an alliance to overthrow the military regime, given the obvious claims of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to perpetuate himself in power.. The pact was later adhered to by the sectors of Mariano Ospina Pérez and Gilberto Álzate Avendaño.
On July 20, 1957, and after the fall of the government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, Gómez signed the Pact of Sitges with Lleras that would define Colombian politics for the next 17 years, creating an alternation of executive and legislative powers between the two traditional parties until 1974, in what became known as the National Front.
Gómez returned to Colombia where he continued to lead the Conservative Party.
For the 1958 elections, Gómez proposed his fellow party member Guillermo León Valencia as the candidate of the National Front, for the Conservative Party. However, the support of the conservatives quickly turned to the liberal Lleras Camargo, so Valencia had to withdraw its candidacy and join that of Lleras, who finally won the presidency, which represented the victory for the Gómez sector over that of Gilberto Álzate.
In 1962, Valencia once again presented his candidacy, and in compliance with the Sigtes and Benidorm pacts, he received the support of the Liberals, and was elected president. Elected Valencia, Gómez withdrew from politics permanently.
In his spare time, Gómez gave talks to the conservative youth groups of the Universidad Libre de Bogotá, whose president, Álvaro Atencia Carcamo, was seen by his followers as the most suitable to continue his legacy. He also continued to be an influential political voice through his newspaper El Siglo. During his last years, Gómez did not leave his room frequently and got around with the help of a wheelchair.
Death
Laureano Gómez Castro died at 2:10 in the afternoon on Tuesday, July 13, 1965, at his residence at Carrera 15 No. 38-00 in Bogotá; victim of internal bleeding due to a gastric condition, at the age of 76. He was accompanied by his wife María Hurtado, and his children Cecilia, Álvaro and Enrique, daughters-in-law, grandchildren and their family doctors. His son Álvaro's was close to dying when his flight from Soledad to Bogotá (in which he intended to get home before the death of his father) suffered some setbacks.
Regarding the posthumous honors he was to receive, Gómez stated in a column in his newspaper on December 1, 1960:
Recommendations for my family and my friends in the case of my death. Death notices should include a request not to send any kind of crowns. Religious services will be in the parish church or in the cemetery chapel. They must be limited to strictly liturgical, without music or singing. No burning cameras will be tolerated, in public or private buildings. No funerals will be tolerated by the epoch. No speeches. The century will be limited to a journalistic account without any trial or praise. The body must be deposited in a common vault.Laureano Gómez, 1960
Their funerals were nothing short of an event. In addition to the national authorities, among the many Colombians who came to pay posthumous tribute, there were important national political personalities such as Darío Echandía, Guillermo León Valencia, Belisario Betancur, María Eugenia Rojas, Alfonso López Michelsen, Julio César Turbay Ayala and their sons Alvaro and Enrique. As he stated in life, his funeral was not paid for by the State and no flowers were brought to his grave, and his corpse was embalmed.
Private life
Family
Although Laureano Gómez was not, strictly speaking, a member of an oligarchic family, his political connections within conservatism allowed him to climb the ladder, until his family became one of the most important in Colombia. He was the son of the conservative politician José Laureano Gómez Rincón and Dolores Franco Castro, both from Ocaña.
Marriage
Laureano married María Hurtado Cajiao on September 9, 1916, having 4 childrenː Cecilia, Álvaro, Rafael and Enrique Gómez Hurtado. María was a distinguished lady from Popayán, belonging to the Colombian political elite, since she had ancestors from several oligarchic families.
María was the daughter of Simón Hurtado Pino (finance minister in the government of Rafael Reyes), granddaughter of Nicolás Hurtado y Arboleda (mayor of Popayán), and great-grandniece of the wise man from New Granada and hero of independence Antonio Arboleda y Arrachea, who in turn he was married to the granddaughter of the banker Pedro Agustín de Valencia y Castillo. María was, therefore, related to the Arboledaː brothers Joaquín, Tomás Cipriano, and the twins Manuel María and Manuel José Mosquera y Arboleda, since María Manuel Arboleda, the mother of the brothers, was the sister of María Ignacia Arboleda, the great-grandmother of Maria, on the one hand; and on the other with the Valencia de Popayán family.
On the other hand, María was a half-niece of the conservative politician Ezequiel Hurtado Hurtado, who was president of Colombia for a few months in 1884, since she was a granddaughter, as mentioned before, of Nicolás Hurtado, a common root between her father Simón Hurtado Peña, and his half brother, Ezequiel Hurtado.
Offspring
Enrique Gómez Hurtado was a lawyer and economist, and was in charge of directing the newspaper that Laureano co-founded in 1931, El Siglo. He was director of the Colombian Olympic Committee in the Urdaneta government. He passed away in 2019.
His eldest son, Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, was a political journalist, diplomat, and a charismatic and influential leader of the Conservative Party, as well as a born orator. He was a presidential candidate in 1974, 1986 and 1990, losing in every race. Álvaro was eventually elected by his own party (National Salvation Movement) as constituent of the 1990 Assembly, which gave Colombia the 1991 Constitution. He was also one of the three presidents of the legislative body. He was assassinated in 1995, with various versions of his crime remaining to date as an unsolvable court case.
Laureano's grandsons, Miguel and Enrique Gómez Martínez, are also influential lawyers. Miguel is a politician and was a senator of Colombia between 2010 and 2014. Enrique took on the case of the murder of his uncle Álvaro de él.
Friendships
Despite being fierce political rivals, Laureano Gómez and Alfonso López Pumarejo were great friends, associating politically on more than one occasion. It is known that Gómez attended the honorary graduation that López received at the National University in 1959, the year he died. It is known that Gómez suffered the death of López with great sadness. He also maintained, during his periods of exile, friendships with the Spaniards Miguel de Unamuno and Juan de la Cierva.
The three punitive sonnets and the hundred sonnets against Neruda
One of the journalistic facets of Laureano Gómez was his quality as a literary and cultural critic. Among those occasions, he published an article in his newspaper El Siglo on the occasion of the visit of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to Bogotá, in 1943. In it he called the Chilean poet a "Harlequín de renglón corto", in reference to to the consideration of his poetry as no more than a "literary antics". The day he arrived in Bogotá, a satirical sonnet titled Salutation to Don Neftalí appeared in El Siglo in which Gómez mocked both Neruda and the snobbery of the Bogota intelligentsia that he was enthusiastic about at the arrival of him
The surprise was that Neruda himself responded to the criticism. And for this he published the Three punitive sonnets of Pablo Neruda against Laureano Gómez . They were sonnets against Gómez. Given this, Gómez published One hundred sonnets against Pablo Neruda over a period of time in El Siglo.
Other information
According to the database of the National Registry of Civil Status, the first ID issued in Colombia was number 01, issued on November 24, 1952. The owner of the ID was Laureano Gómez.
Tributes
The IED Industrial Technician Laureano Gómez in Bogotá.
The Laureano Gómez monument in the north of Bogotá.A statue in Gramalote (Norte de Santander).