Who killed Gaitan?


Published on March 13, 2001 in El Tiempo, and on March 16, 2001 in El Nuevo Herald

by Eduardo Escobar

The history of Colombia is a tangle of unknowns and a thicket of crimes to resolve.  No one knows these heights, or lows, who killed the immaculate Sucre; if Bolivar was killed by tuberculosis and  deception or by the venom imparted by a shopkeepers' guild; who killed Obando, Uribe Uribe, Luis Carlos Galan, Lara Bonilla.  Some believe that Lara was assassinated by the DEA, to unleash the persecution of the State against the mafias.  And Galan, by a group of traitors in his party.

The most colorful political crime that has made rivers of saliva run is that of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.  For many, his death was the origin of all of the national evils of today.  In each case, furies were unleashed on the country.  And released a storm of disasters, offenses and conflagrations that reduced our cities to ashess.  Those of us who were too young to understand learned the smell of the ashes.  And this is the sad aspect.

In all of the crimes of our recent history, not only ours, in all the world, the CIA appears as an ever present phantasm.  (And who hid behind Pinochet?  The CIA.  And who judges the CIA?)  And also in the case of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.  The paranoid Yankee conservatives would have recognized the monstrous face of communism behind the clay mask of Gaitan shaped in Italy with the socialists and decided to throw him to the dogs of their secret police.  This is the opinion of the communists of note.

There are others.  The conservatives of Manizales think that Gaitan was killed by the communists to throw the blame on the CIA, precisely, to burn Bogota and to take the Radiodifusora Nacional so that Jorge Zalamea could be trained as a radio announcer.  After some years a book by Silvio Villegas arrived in my hands, after I was robbed of an unforgettable friend from Medellin, unforgettable for his book, about the events of the ninth of April.  Villegas reproduced letters sent between young Cubans in Bogota to sabotage the Panamerican Conference.  One was named Fidel Castro.  The other, Rafael del Pino.  The opinion of the conservatives of Manizales coincides with that of the gringos.

Half of the Gaitanistas that I know think that their leader was killed by local conservatives to block his access to power.  The other half, who were the intelligencia of their own party, of the official wing, think the same.  In the courtyard of the rich girls' college where his daughter studied, it was known the previous evening that they were going to kill Gaitan.  Her little friends would have known to plan the sacrifice of their homes, between chilies, cheese from Paipa and tamales with chocolate.  Who knows.  Perhaps they heard prophecies.  But anything is possible in politics from Agripina and Claudio.  A sly Bogotano in a perverse joke said that Gaitan arrived in the arm of one of his best friends served in a bowl for the shooter.  Or shooters.  As in the death of Kennedy, other theories exist than that of the lone assassin, a theory of two shooters.  And three.  You are going to know.

There is a hypothesis that puts a Greek touch on the shadowy act.  Roa Sierra, illegitimate son of the father of Jorge Eliecer, would have killed his half brother in envy, according to one; according to another, jealousies moved the criminal, so the stepbrother killed him for their girlfriend; and according to a third, Roa was crazy.  And his act was gratuitous.  A Bogota writer writes his own soap opera; a German fortune teller that Roa visited broke his heart with horoscopes.

The irreplacable Giraldo, a reporter of ferocious intelligence and a disposition like black smoke, who was familiar with all of the unhealthy inspirations of the country from the war of a thousand days, told me I don't know who killed the black Gaitan.  I know that he died of drowning.  I don't know one single waitress in Bogota that wouldn't have been proud to have given him a glass of water in his agony.



Translation by Paul Wolf