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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
16. These problems have been going on since 1946, over 70 years ago, a bit farther back than Chavez.
Mon Jun 18, 2018, 05:57 PM
Jun 2018

Sorry, the facts have very little to do with lions, or with Chavez, or with Maduro.

Summary of the violent conflict which has lasted so long in Colombia:


La Violencia in Colombia
The transfer of power in 1946 ignited tensions between the Liberal and Conservative parties, resulting in violent political conflict, particularly in rural areas. The loss of peace foreboded the return to competitive and exclusionary politics, similar to the situation preceding the War of a Thousand Days. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, violence and exclusion more than threatened the political system; they ruptured it. A democratically elected administration became repressive and dictatorial, which led to its overthrow by the sole military coup in the twentieth century. Only by having the reins of power taken from both of their hands did the traditional elites recognize that the most effective way to avoid interparty civil wars and possible military dictatorships was to join forces and restrain their competitive tendencies.

In 1946 Conservative Mariano Ospina Pérez assumed office and was faced with the difficult task of ruling from a minority position, as Liberals had received the majority of all presidential votes and continued to control Congress. Ospina tried to confront this situation by incorporating Liberals into a coalition government. Meanwhile, the level of political rivalry intensified in the countryside, where Conservatives pursued a course of violence in an attempt to consolidate power after sixteen years out of office. Liberals retaliated and, under Jorge Eliecer Gaitán's leadership, became highly mobilized in their demands that the Ospina government confront the social needs of the modernizing and urbanizing nation.

Gaitanism, the populist social movement led by Gaitán as a faction of the Liberal Party, increased dramatically between 1946 and 1948. Gaitán supported the democratic rather than the revolutionary path to reforms. By advocating the passage of more socially liberal policies, he appealed to the masses and he united urban workers and campesinos. As the movement grew, observers believed that Gaitán would be elected president, which may have happened had he lived to see the next election.

Liberal victories in the 1947 congressional elections demonstrated the party's strength among the electorate. Ospina became increasingly concerned with retaining Conservative control and provoked Liberals further by resorting frequently to police enforcement of Conservative
privileges in the rural areas. The Liberal appointees in his government resigned in protest in March 1948.

The following month, the inevitable explosion occurred in the form of the most violent and destructive riot in the country's long history of conflict. On April 9, Gaitán was assassinated at midday in the heart of Bogotá. An angry mob immediately seized and killed the assassin. In the ensuing riot, some 2,000 people were killed, and a large portion of downtown Bogotá was destroyed. The Bogotazo, as the episode came to be called, was an expression of mass social frustration and grief by a people who had lost the man who represented their only potential link to the decision-making process.


More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/colombia/la-violencia.htm




Jorge Eliecer Gaitán



Bogota after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán





Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Biography
Mayor (1902–1948)
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was a political leader who was considered a champion of the Colombian people and was revered as a martyr after his assassination.

Synopsis
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was born January 26, 1902 in Bogotá, Colombia. He organized a short-lived party called Union Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (Left Revolutionary National Union). His maiden speech as a congressman was a polemic attack on the plantations owned by the United Fruit Company. Gaitán served as mayor of Bogotá and minister of education. He was assassinated on April 9, 1948.

https://www.biography.com/people/jorge-eli%C3%A9cer-gait%C3%A1n-39091


Wikipedia:

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala (January 23, 1903 – April 9, 1948) was a politician, a leader of a populist movement in Colombia, a former Education Minister (1940) and Labor Minister (1943–1944), mayor of Bogotá (1936) and one of the most charismatic leaders of the Liberal Party. He was assassinated during his second presidential campaign in 1948, setting off the Bogotazo[2] and leading to a violent period of political unrest in Colombian history known as La Violencia (approx. 1948 to 1958).

. . .

Early political career
Gaitán was active in politics in the early 1920s, when he was part of a protest movement against president Marco Fidel Suárez.

Gaitán increased his nationwide popularity following a banana workers' strike in Magdalena in 1928.

After U.S. officials in Colombia, along with United Fruit representatives, portrayed the worker's strike as "communist" with "subversive tendency", in telegrams to the U.S. Secretary of State,[11] the government of the United States of America threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. Strikers were fired upon by the army[12] on the orders of the United Fruit Company, resulting in numerous deaths.

Gaitán used his skills as a lawyer and as an emerging politician in order to defend workers' rights and called for accountability to those involved in the Santa Marta Massacre.[12] Public support soon shifted toward Gaitán, Gaitán's Liberal Party won the 1930 presidential election.[12]

. . .

The assassination provoked a violent riot known as the Bogotazo (loose translation: the sack of Bogotá, or shaking of Bogotá), and a further ten years of violence during which at least 300,000 people died (a period known as La Violencia). Some writers say that this event influenced Castro's views about the viability of an electoral route for political change.

Also in the city that day was another young man who would become a giant of 20th-century Latin-American history: Colombian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Gabriel García Márquez. A young law student and short story writer at the time, García Márquez was eating lunch near the scene of the assassination. He arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting and witnessed the murder of Gaitán's presumed assassin at the hands of enraged bystanders. García Márquez discusses this day at vivid length in the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale. In his book, he describes a well-dressed man who eggs on the mob before fleeing in a luxurious car that arrived just as the presumed assassin was being dragged away.

Two former CIA officers recognized in the book "The Invisible Government" CIA involvement in the murder of Gaitán.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Eli%C3%A9cer_Gait%C3%A1n
So it's back to war against the leftists, back to the gov't-associated death squad paramilitaries, Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #1
Heartbreaking. Your post dovetails perfectly with the news of Trump child concentration camps sandensea Jun 2018 #4
So very, very true. Colombia used to be known as the country which produced so much coffee. Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #6
Fraud! Puzzler Jun 2018 #2
And if anybody dared investigate said fraud, sandensea Jun 2018 #3
Colombia voters have often had assistance in making up their minds about their votes.... Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #5
RESIST slumcamper Jun 2018 #7
Alas, that can get one killed in Colombia. sandensea Jun 2018 #8
It almost looks like a story a sane person could predict this evening. Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #9
Ivan Duque noncliqer Jun 2018 #10
If anyone has any more news/updates Puzzler Jun 2018 #11
Allow me to recommend Colombia Reports. sandensea Jun 2018 #12
Thank you Puzzler Jun 2018 #13
You're welcome, Martin. sandensea Jun 2018 #14
I'm guessing the horrific performance of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela had an effect here stevenleser Jun 2018 #15
These problems have been going on since 1946, over 70 years ago, a bit farther back than Chavez. Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #16
I'm aware of that. Surely you are also aware of how Venezuela and it's regime is viewed stevenleser Jun 2018 #18
I'm aware of how the corporate media is explaining it. How does that relate to the thread? n/t Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #19
No, not the "corporate media". The entire region. nt stevenleser Jun 2018 #20
Doubts loom over Colombia peace deal with hawk's election Judi Lynn Jun 2018 #17
Latest Discussions»Latest Breaking News»Conservative Ivan Duque p...»Reply #16