“I’m a new man, Dr. Vega,” I said. “Now I know how and why the wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez began.”
A few days later—on February 7, 1948—Gaitán held the first political ceremony I ever attended in my life: a procession for the countless victims of official violence in the country, with more than sixty thousand women and men in strict mourning, carrying the red flags of the party and the black flags of Liberal grief. There was only one rallying cry: absolute silence. And it was maintained with inconceivable dramatic effect, even on the balconies of residences and offices where people watched us walk along the eleven crowded blocks of the main avenue. Beside me a woman murmured a prayer to herself. A man nearby looked at her in surprise:
“Señora, please!”
She moaned an apology and sank into an ocean of phantoms. What brought me to the verge of tears, however, was the crowd’s careful steps and breathing in the supernatural silence. I had come without political conviction, drawn by the curiosity of the silence, and the sudden knot of tears in my throat took me by surprise. Gaitán’s speech on the Plaza de Bolívar, from the balcony of the municipal comptroller’s office, was a funeral oration with an overwhelming emotional charge. Against the sinister predictions of his own party, he ended with the most hazardous circumstance of his rallying cry: there was no applause at all.
That was the “march of silence,” the most moving of all the marches ever held in Colombia. The impression left after that historic afternoon, among his partisans and his enemies, was that Gaitán’s election was unstoppable. The Conservatives knew it as well, because of the degree of depravity that the violence had reached all over the country, the ferocity shown by the regime’s police against unarmed Liberalism, and its scorched-earth policy. The darkest manifestation of the country’s state of mind was experienced that weekend by those who attended the bullfight in the Bogotá arena, when the people in the bleachers invaded the bullring, indignant at the tameness of the bull and the inability of the bullfighter to kill it once and for all. The enraged crowd quartered the bull while it was still alive. Numerous reporters and writers who experienced the horror, or heard about it, interpreted this as the most frightening symptom of the brutal rage afflicting the country. In that climate of high tension the Ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogotá opened on March 30, at four-thirty in the afternoon. The city had been renovated at enormous cost, following the pompous esthetic of Minister of State Laureano Gómez, who by virtue of his position was president of the conference. The ministers of state of all the countries in Latin America attended, as well as important personages of the time. The most eminent Colombian politicians were invited as guests of honor, with the unique exception of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, excluded no doubt by the very significant veto of Laureano Gómez, and perhaps by that of some Liberal leaders who despised him for his attacks on the oligarchy common to both parties. The polestar of the conference was General George Marshall, the delegate from the United States and the great hero of the recent war, who had the dazzling brilliance of a film star because he was directing the reconstruction of a Europe annihilated by the conflict.
But on Friday, April 9, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was the man of the day in the news because he had obtained the pardon of Lieutenant Jesús María Cortés Poveda, accused of killing the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa. Gaitán had been euphoric when he came to his law offices at the crowded intersection of Carrera Séptima and Avenida Jiménez de Quesada, a little before eight in the morning, in spite of having been at court until the small hours. He had various appointments for the next few hours, but he accepted without hesitation when Plinio Mendoza Neira invited him to have lunch, a little before one o’clock, with six personal and political friends who had gone to his office to congratulate him for the legal victory that the newspapers had not published yet. Among them was his personal physician, Pedro Eliseo Cruz, who was also a member of his political inner circle.
In that intense atmosphere, I sat down to have lunch in the dining room of the pensión where I lived, less than three blocks away. They had not yet served the soup when Wilfrido Mathieu came and stood in horror at my table.
“The country’s fucked,” he told me. “They just killed Gaitán in front of El Gato Negro.”
Mathieu was an exemplary student of medicine and surgery, a native of Sucre like other residents in the pensión, who suffered from sinister premonitions. Less than a week before he had announced that the most imminent and terrible one, because of its devastating consequences, might be the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. But this did not impress anyone because you did not need premonitions to suppose that would happen.
I almost did not have the heart to race across the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and arrive breathless at the café El Gato Negro, almost at the corner of Carrera Séptima. They had just taken the wounded man, still alive but without hope of surviving, to the Clínica Central, some four blocks away. A group of men were dipping their handkerchiefs into the pool of warm blood to keep as historical relics. A woman in a black shawl and espadrilles, one of the many who sold trinkets in the area, held a bloody handkerchief and growled:
“Sons of bitches, they went and killed him.”
Bands of bootblacks armed with their wooden boxes tried to knock down the metal gates of the Granada drug store, where the few police on duty had locked away the attacker to protect him from the angry mob. A tall man, very much in control of himself and wearing an irreproachable gray suit as if he were going to a wedding, urged them on with well-calculated shouts that were so effective the owner of the pharmacy had raised the metal gates for fear they would burn the store. The attacker, clutching a police officer, succumbed to panic at the sight of the maddened crowds rushing toward him.
“Officer,” he pleaded, almost without a voice, “don’t let them kill me.”
I will never be able to forget him. He had disheveled hair, a two-day beard, a dead man’s gray color, and eyes that bulged with terror. He had a very worn brown suit with vertical stripes, its lapels ripped by the first tugs of the mob. It was an instantaneous and eternal apparition, because the bootblacks tore him away from the police with blows of their boxes and then kicked him to death. The first time he went down he had lost a shoe.
“To the Palacio!” shouted the man in gray, who has never been identified. “To the Palacio!”
The most hotheaded obeyed. They seized the bloody corpse by the ankles and dragged it along Carrera Séptima toward Plaza de Bolívar past the last electric streetcars stopped by the news, shouting warlike insults against the government. From sidewalks and balconies they were urged on with shouts and applause, while the corpse disfigured by blows was leaving shreds of his clothing and his body on the paving stones. Many joined the march, which in less than six blocks had reached the size and expansive power of an outbreak of war. All that was left on the macerated corpse were undershorts and a shoe.
The Plaza de Bolívar, which had just been refurbished, did not have the majesty of other historic Fridays, with its graceless trees and the rudimentary statues of the new official esthetic. At the Capitolio Nacional, where the Pan-American Conference had opened ten days earlier, the delegates had left for lunch. And so the mob continued on to the Palacio Presidencial, which had also been abandoned. There they left what remained of the corpse, clothed only in the shreds of his undershorts, his left shoe, and two inexplicable ties knotted around his neck. Minutes later the president of the Republic, Mariano Ospina Pérez, and his wife arrived for lunch after having opened a cattle fair in the town of Engativá. Until that moment they had not known about the assassination because the radio in the presidential automobile had been turned off.
I remained at the scene of the crime for ten more minutes, surprised by the speed with which the accounts of witnesses were changing in form and substance until they lost all resemblance to reality. We were at the intersection of Avenida Jiménez and Carrera Séptima, at the time of day it was most crowded, and fifty steps from El Tie
mpo. By then we knew that those accompanying Gaitán when he left his office were Pedro Eliseo Cruz, Alejandro Vallejo, Jorge Padilla, and Plinio Mendoza Neira, minister of war in the recent government of Alfonso López Pumarejo. It was he who had invited them all to lunch. Gaitán had left the building where he had his office without bodyguards of any kind, surrounded by a compact group of friends. As soon as they reached the sidewalk, Mendoza took his arm, led him a step ahead of the others, and said:
“What I wanted to tell you is something really stupid.”
He could not say more. Gaitán covered his face with his arm and Mendoza heard the first shot before he saw, standing in front of them, the man who with the coldness of a professional aimed the revolver and shot three bullets into the head of the leader. An instant later there was already talk of a fourth shot that missed, and perhaps a fifth.
Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who had come with his father and his sisters, Elvira and Rosa Inés, saw Gaitán sprawled faceup on the sidewalk a minute before he was taken to the hospital. “He didn’t seem dead,” he told me years later. “He was like an imposing statue lying on the sidewalk beside a meager bloodstain and with a great sadness in his open, staring eyes.” In the confusion of the moment his sisters thought their father had been killed too, and they were so dazed that Plinio Apuleyo took them onto the first streetcar that passed to get them away from the scene. But the conductor had full knowledge of what had happened, and he threw his cap to the floor and left the trolley in the middle of the street in order to join in the first shouts of the rebellion. Minutes later it was the first streetcar overturned by the crazed mob.
The discrepancies regarding the number and role of the protagonists were unresolvable because one witness declared there had been three who took turns firing, and another said that the real shooter had slipped into the unruly crowd and without haste had climbed onto a moving streetcar. What Mendoza Neira wanted to ask Gaitán when he took his arm was none of the many things that have been speculated on since then, only that he authorize the creation of an institute to educate union leaders. Or, as his father-in-law had joked a few days earlier: “A school to teach philosophy to the chauffeur.” Before he could mention it the first shot had been fired in front of them.
Fifty years later, my memory is still fixed on the image of the man who seemed to incite the crowd outside the pharmacy, and I have not found him in any of the countless testimonies I have read about that day. I had seen him up close, with his expensive suit, his alabaster skin, and a millimetric control of his actions. He attracted my attention so much that I kept an eye on him until he was picked up by too new a car as soon as the assassin’s corpse was dragged away, and from then on he seemed to be erased from historical memory. Even mine, until many years later, in my days as a reporter, when it occurred to me that the man had managed to have a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one.
The Cuban student leader Fidel Castro was in that uncontrollable tumult, twenty years old and a delegate from the University of Havana to the student congress convened as a democratic replica of the Pan-American Conference. He had arrived some six days earlier, in the company of Alfredo Guevara, Enrique Ovares, and Rafael del Pino—Cuban university students like him—and one of his first acts was to request an appointment with Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whom he admired. Two days later Castro saw Gaitán, who scheduled an appointment with him for the following Friday. Gaitán himself made a note of the meeting in his desk diary, on the page corresponding to April 9: “Fidel Castro, 2pm.”
According to what he has recounted in various media and on different occasions, and in the endless accounts we have made together in the course of a long friendship, Fidel first heard of the crime while walking around the area so that he would be on time for his two o’clock appointment. All of a sudden he was surprised by the first crowds running wild and the general shout:
“They killed Gaitán!”
Fidel Castro did not realize until later that the meeting could not in any way take place before four or five o’clock, because of Mendoza Neira’s unexpected invitation to Gaitán to have lunch.
There was no room for anyone else at the crime scene. Traffic had stopped and streetcars were overturned, and so I headed for the pensión to finish lunch, when my teacher, Carlos H. Pareja, blocked my way at the door to his office and asked me where I was going.
“I’m going to eat lunch,” I said.
“Don’t fuck around,” he said in his unrepentant Caribbean slang. “How can you think about eating lunch when they just killed Gaitán?”
Without giving me time to do anything else, he ordered me to go to the university and put myself at the head of the student protest. The strange thing was that contrary to my nature, I paid attention to him. I continued north along Carrera Séptima, in the opposite direction from the mob that was curious, grief-stricken, and enraged as it rushed toward the crime corner. Buses from the Universidad Nacional, driven by angry students, were at the head of the march. In the Parque Santander, a hundred meters from the crime corner, employees were hurrying to close the entrances to the Hotel Granada—the most luxurious in the city—where some ministers and notable guests of the Pan-American Conference were staying at the time.
A new throng of poor people in an open attitude of combat surged forward from every corner. Many were armed with machetes they had just stolen in the first assaults on stores, and they seemed eager to use them. I did not have a clear perspective on the possible consequences of the assassination, and I was more interested in lunch than in the protest, and so I retraced my steps to the pensión. I ran up the stairs, convinced that my politicized friends were ready for war. But no: the dining room was empty, and my brother and José Palencia—who shared the adjoining room—were singing with other friends in their bedroom.
“They killed Gaitán!” I shouted.
They signaled that they already knew, but everyone’s state of mind was more recreational than funereal, and they did not interrupt the song. Then we sat down to eat lunch in the deserted dining room, convinced the matter would go no further, until someone turned up the volume of the radio so that we indifferent ones could hear. Carlos H. Pareja, honoring the way he had incited me an hour earlier, announced the formation of the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno composed of the most notable Liberals on the left, among them the very well-known writer and politician Jorge Zalamea. Their first resolution was the establishment of the executive committee, the command of the National Police, and all the organisms for a revolutionary state. Then the other members of the junta spoke with rallying cries that grew more and more extravagant.
In the solemnity of the act, the first thing that occurred to me was what my father would think when he learned that his cousin, the hard-nosed Goth, was the principal leader of an extreme left-wing revolution. The landlady at the pensión, considering the importance of the names connected to universities, was surprised that they were behaving not like professors but like rowdy students. It was enough to go past two stations on the dial to find a different country. On Radio Nacional, the pro-government Liberals were calling for calm, on other stations they were clamoring against Communists loyal to Moscow, while the highest leaders of official Liberalism defied the dangers of the warring streets as they tried to reach the Palacio Presidencial to negotiate a pledge of unity with the Conservative government.
We continued to be dazed by that demented confusion until one of the landlady’s sons shouted that the house was on fire. In fact, a crack had opened in the rear masonry wall and thick black smoke was beginning to rarefy the air in the bedrooms. It came, no doubt, from the Departmental Office of the Interior adjacent to the pensión, which had been set on fire by the rioters, but the wall seemed strong enough to keep standing. And so we raced down the stairs and confronted a city at war. The tumultuous attackers were throwing everything they could find in the offices of the Gobernación out the windows. The smoke from the fires had darkened the air, and the clouded
sky was a sinister blanket. Maddened hordes, armed with machetes and all kinds of tools stolen from the hardware stores, attacked and set fire to the businesses along Carrera Séptima and the adjacent streets with the help of mutinous police officers. An instantaneous glance was enough for us to realize that the situation was out of control. My brother anticipated my thought with a shout:
“Shit, the typewriter!”
We ran to the pawnshop, which was still intact with its metal grates locked, but the typewriter was not where it had always been. We were not concerned, thinking that in the days that followed we could recover it, still not realizing that this colossal disaster would have no days that followed.
The military garrison in Bogotá limited itself to protecting government centers and banks, and public order was left to no one’s responsibility. After the first few hours many high-ranking officials of the police had entrenched themselves in the Quinta División, and numerous patrolmen followed them with loads of weapons they had picked up on the streets. Several of them, wearing the red armband of the rebels, fired a rifle so close to us that it resonated in my chest. Since then I have been convinced that just the report of a rifle can kill.
When we returned to the pawnshop we saw the businesses along Carrera Octava, the richest in the city, laid to waste in minutes. The exquisite jewels, English woolens, and Bond Street hats that we students from the coast had admired in unreachable shopwindows were now within reach of everyone under the gaze of impassive soldiers guarding foreign banks. The very refined Café San Marino, which we never could enter, was open and dismantled, for once without the waiters in tuxedos hurrying to stop Caribbean students from going in.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 32
