REGIME OF BAYONETS by Vernon Lee Fluharty
Laureano Gomez took the oath of office as President on August 7, 1950. Since Congress had been suspended, he was sworn in before the Supreme Court -- an emasculated Court, demoralized and under the bans imposed by Ospina Perez.
As the office changed hands, Gomez praised Ospina "My gratitude is boundless. I hope to be able to imitate the proofs of courage and virtue so amply displayed by Your Excellency, which saved Colombia."
Then, stating that law and order would be maintained, he dwelt upon things dearer to the hearts of the oligarchy -- the government would take rapid, firm steps to favor business, to develop industry, and to attract foreign capital.
One short month after taking office, Gomez issued a decree which disqualified Eduardo Santos (who was Second Designate, corresponding to Vice President) from succeeding to the office of President. Since Santos was a Liberal, Gomez thus insured continuismo of the Conservative regime. He was now free to put the counterreform into effect.
Gomez' choice as director of the repression was Roberto Urdaneta Arbelaez, who had organized the police shock troops at the beginning of Ospina's term. A former Ambassador to Spain, Jesuit-educated, and nationalist, Urdaneta became Minister of War, and announced that his mission would be essentially that of eliminating "banditry" in the provinces.
The most troublesome area was the llanos, where the wiry, tough little horsemen of the plains had risen in a fight to the death against the Conservative totalitarianism. To crush them, Urdaneta sent a full-scale military expedition over the eastern mountain wall and down upon the burning flatlands. By his orders, commanders were to treat as bandits those over sixteen who fled from the military forces, all who violated the eleven to five curfew, and all civilians who carried firearms without authorization and were without a safe-conduct signed by the military. Bandits could be summarily executed.
Unquestionably, many of the insurrectionists were truly bandits. But most of them were country people whose lands had been confiscated, whose homes had been burned or confiscated, whose women had been violated by the Political Police. For the forces of repression had enlisted many criminals, just as outlaws had attached themselves to the partisan forces. And so, the fratricide went on, in an expanding bloody circle of violence without end. A letter to the writer, from a one-time supporter of Gomez, and who was also a member of the Conservative Directorate of Antioquia, mirrors both the impetus which the struggle had gained, and the growing disillusionment of the Gomistas
Many things have happened in my country since we last spoke personally about it ... the armed resistance to the legitimate government increased and spread to many regions ... besides the Llanos Orientales ... formerly free of violence. This explains how some parts of Antioquia [the southwest, Uraba Puerto Berrio, etc.] became affected, and a great many people had to flee their homes and establish themselves in neighboring towns or in the over-crowded city of Medellin.
We have to admit that even if the largest number of abuses and violent acts were committed by the "guerrilleros", the Police and the Army in many cases took reprisals which, in turn, originated further attacks by the rebels. It got to the point where it seemed an unending circle. The government after some time, in an effort to placate hatreds, offered an unconditional amnesty to all those who had not committed crimes or thefts, but were only participating in the insurrection as political sympathizers or in reprisal for harm inflicted upon their relatives or friends. However, this measure was not adopted, and the fighting went on, at times calming down, but at others acquiring a marked ferocity. The "bandits -- as the government called them -- always counted, if not on the open support, at least on the approval of the Liberal leaders, who never rejected their procedures.
But the Army in the llanos stalled, unable to defeat, even to find the main partisan forces. Thereupon, military planes flew over the sun-baked towns and hamlets, dropping leaflets which ordered the evacuation of the region. And so the women and the children and the men too old to fight shouldered their meager belongings and trudged wearily away, with the smoke of their burning homes making a greasy streak down the wide skies behind them. Where they could, they found homes. Their menfolk in the partisan bands fought on.
To make matters worse, the hate soon took on the coloration of a religious crusade. In the llanos were many Protestant missions. Soon after Urdaneta's "extermination" policy was inaugurated, a group of young men in ages between eighteen and twenty appeared in Sogamoso. They were of the Protestant faith. Their right hands had been cut off by the forces of the repression.
But the Church did not sanction this barbarity. Arciniegas lists some dozen pueblos in the Department of Valle del Cauca where, in 1951, Protestant chapels were burned, but he adds, "The violence has been carried out in the name of religion, against the will of the Catholic Church, to which the fanatical clergy paid no attention, as happened in Spain." Nonetheless, Gomez' deep nostalgia for the wedding of the Hispanic Two Swords was the fiat upon which the repression was based, though translated into the will of the Conservative party and the Catholic Church. Occasionally, the latter was embarrassed. The account of a Catholic priest in Rionegro indicates that not all the clergy stood behind Gomez' methods
It was approximately eleven o'clock at night ... when a loud shout brought me to the window of the parish house.... I saw a group of some fifty people shouting "vivas" to the Conservative Party and the Catholic religion ... when I heard them shout "Long live the Catholic faith," I called out at the top of my voice from the window "Listen to me, all you men and citizens of Rionegro as a priest I forbid you to shout 'Long live the Catholic faith,' for the Catholic religion does not sanction violence."
On the other hand, the Church offered an attitude only somewhere between the extremes, and deplored the "unchristian" attitude of the masses. In 1951, Father Felix Restrepo, S.J., wrote, "It is certain that our people are Catholic, but how far the great mass of them are from understanding and assimilating the doctrine of Christ!" And he is corrected by Antonio Garcia for this interpretation of the popular insurrection, in a public letter which bitterly criticizes the Church's attitude "In this case the argument is incomplete, because not only the great masses but also the rich minorities are outside true Christian militancy. Hence, the impenetrable feeling of caste which is theirs, their racial aristocratism, their insolence and their Hedonistic ethics. How can the heavy crust of their egoism be broken while their power as a class is maintained with their system of privilege?"
In essence, it was the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Castilian Reconquest from the pagan Moors, all over again in miniature. The worst of the Hispanic character systematically loosed the cruelty, African and Semitic in origin, which can almost casually send a man howling to his death in flames; which shows its genius in obscene and inhuman tortures until human flesh can stand no more, and dies. The essence of it is in these words
The villages burned, the children mutilated in their schools, the jails filled to overflowing with prisoners denied a trial or a judge, the men castrated in cold blood, those tortured in police dungeons, the women killed after being subjected to ignominy, the gagged press, the dwellings leveled by some functionary under arms, these ... brought moral ruin and the most abject complicity. We all just let it go on, because we did not hear the weeping of wounded children, and because the river of blood did not physically reach up about our feet! These hundreds of thousands of dead, of exiled, of fugitives, killed or shriveled the souls of everyone. But especially they left their stain on the only spiritual and political power that might have been able to disarm the government and the parties. In place of religious and human reasons, the Church preferred "Political Reason."
It is difficult to distill the essence of this violent epoch in Colombian history, but something of the unbridled hate and savagery should be set forth in this study, for the wounds went too deep, were too basic, to be forgotten; they are still there, demanding the healing of some government or another. They may break and reopen under social friction at some unforeseen day in the future, and for this reason, they are important. Philip Payne, a Time correspondent, caught the essence of it in a dispatch written in 1951, and it is quoted here in its entirety
Liberal guerrillas were in the neighborhood, and the stoutly Conservative residents of San Pedro de Jagua knew well that their homes might be struck next.
... Early this year San Pedro's citizens organized a raid- warning system among the outlying plantations and ranches. Any farmer who spotted bandits coming was to sound the alarm by setting off a dynamite bomb.
At 430 one day recently, there was a dull boom in the east. The warning did not save San Pedro. Minutes later, a uniformed column approached the village. "Don't shoot!" cried one marcher. "We're the Army." By the time San Pedro's garrison [police] of 18 realized that the column was some 50 bandits in stolen army uniforms, it was too late. "Surrender or die!" the bandits roared, and with one brief volley they dispersed the defenders. Two hundred more bandits, not uniformed, poured into the city, shouting, "Long live the Liberal Party!"
The rising sun showed the villagers who their attackers were mostly country boys, some as young as 14, every one with a good Mauser rifle (a few had automatic rifles), a revolver, a machete, a knife. Commanding the bandits from San Pedro's central plaza was a lightly-built man of about 25, clad in a new ruana. This was the storied bandit chief, Tulio Bautista.
Guns cracked all over town. A boy stepped from a doorway holding a five-peso note; a bullet dropped him, and a grinning bandit pocketed the money. Lighting hand-made grenades with cigarettes, the bandits routed out the hidden villagers. Once the town was subdued, Comandante Tulio, whose well-formed features and steady voice carried his authority, proceeded with the execution of the leading Conservatives. Three young boys were included among the victims. "They are Godos (Goths, the Liberal term for Conservatives) and will grow up," a bandit growled in explanation.
When the sack of San Pedro moved into the next operation, looting, it became plain that Tulio had an extraordinary co- commander -- a dark, slim girl of about 20. The bandits called her Doņa Edelmira; she wore men's clothing, carried two revolvers and a knife, seemed to be Tulio's girl. Edelmira directed the pillage. The bandits stacked the loot in the plaza, loaded it on stolen mules. Bandolera Edelmira enforced a stern rule upon the men; she permitted no raping or kidnapping of the village women.
The bandits found a single Liberal in the local jail, held on suspicion of aiding the bandits. Freed, this man showed Tulio's boys where there were two drums of oil fuel for the local power plant. "If only they hadn't found that fuel," mourned a San Pedro survivor later. Tulio ordered the homes of the town burned, to flush out any possible police ambush, but forbade his men to fire the church or the school.
With smoke still pluming into a clear sky, bandits not busy looting or loading lined up in the plaza to drink aguardiente from the local cantina. They hauled the little harmonium out of the church, tried to play it and failed, and smashed it with rifle butts. Then they found a phonograph. It provided wild music for a dance in the plaza's basketball court. Edelmira did not dance, and under her eye the bandits dared not seek the village women for partners. So the men danced together, one cavorting wildly in the cassock he found in the priest's house.
By mid afternoon, the bandits were ready to leave. At the cemetery they buried their single casualty with military honors. Then they marched away in good order, leaving smoldering ruins and 24 bodies. The surviving people of San Pedro stayed long enough to bury their own dead, to disinter the bandit's body and throw it to the buzzards. Then, the civil war's newest refugees, they struggled westward to seek shelter in the nearest towns.
It was the hour of vengeance: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The fearful power of the government not only held the Liberal majority in check, but reduced it to a cowering minority. Many Liberals fled the country, the leaders slipped away to foreign safety. A few Liberals, calling themselves Popular Liberals, criticized their fellows for not cooperating with the government, which, they believed, played into Gomez' hands. But the Liberal day had passed, lost to party anarchy and divisionism.
And so, terror stalked through Colombia. Forty thousand men had formed into one partisan army alone. Every Department was up in arms, and men thought only to sell their lives dearly. Men lay down to sleep not knowing if they would ever again see the light of day. The destruction of herds and crops was so great that food became scarce in the cities. To meet the crisis, Gomez further restricted civil liberties, gave greater power to the Church, and began systematically to hunt down Liberal leaders. The jails swelled with those unable to escape.
A traveler returning to the United States from Bogota in 1953 told reporters, "Death has become commonplace in Colombia. The words 'assassination' and 'murder' are bandied about with no more emotion than we talk of beans, butter and bread."
And El Colombiano editorialized wearily, "There will be enough hatred in Colombia for the next 150 years."
... exerpt from Dance of the Millions: Military Rule and the Social Revolution in Colombia, by Vernon Lee Fluharty, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957.