Modernization in Colombia

Introduction | i Modernization in Colombia Copyright 2001 by James D. Henderson. This work is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to electronically copy, distribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. However, all printing rights are reserved by the University Press of Florida (http://www.upf.com). Please contact UPF for information about how to obtain copies of the work for print distribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola Modernization in Colombia The Laureano Gómez Years, 1889–1965 James D. Henderson University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers Copyright 2001 by James D. Henderson Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper All rights reserved 06 05 04 03 02 01 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henderson, James D. 1942– Modernization in Colombia: the Laureano Gómez years, 1889–1965 / James D. Henderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8130-1824-2 (alk. paper) 1. Colombia–History–1886–1903. 2. Colombia–History–1903–1946. 3. Colombia–History–1946–1974. 4. Gómez, Laureano, 1889–1965. I. Title. F2276.5.H46 2001 986.106’2–dc21 00-051051 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611–2079 http://www.upf.com This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, James and Barbara Pardue Henderson Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii I. Toward Modernity, 1889–1932 1. Fin de Siècle Colombia 1 2. Teaching the Generation of the Centenary 25 3. Reyes and Republicanism 49 4. The Bourgeois Republic 81 5. Money Comes to Colombia 114 6. Social Change and the Challenge to Traditional Authority 154 II. The Dangers of Political Inauthenticity, 1932–1965 7. The Liberal Republic and Its Critics 191 8. A Society in Flux 239 9. Orchestrating the War of Seven Thousand Days 286 10. Economic Progress and Social Change: From Ospina Pérez to the National Front 325 11. Politics and Violence under Gómez and Rojas 348 12. A Time of Transition, 1957–1965 380 Epilogue: The Passing of the Centenarians 417 Appendix 1. Distribution of Violencia-Related Deaths by Department 423 Appendix 2. Violencia-Related Deaths by Year, 1947–1966 424 Appendix 3. Violencia-Related Deaths per 100,000 Population as a Percentage of 1960 and 1966 Intentional Deaths in Colombia; Intentional Deaths in Colombia Compared with Those in Other Countries 425 Notes 427 Bibliography 459 Index 485 Illustrations 1. Physical map of Colombia 2 2. Political map of Colombia 3 3. Government soldiers during the War of the Thousand Days, circa 1901 43 4. Aristides Fernández, circa 1902 44 5. Bogotá’s Calle Real, circa 1905 61 6. Laureano Gómez, 1921 112 7. Coffee harvesters 127 8. Formal photograph of an Antioquian campesino, circa 1920 128 9. Luis Jaramillo Walker, circa 1916 130 10. President Pedro Nel Ospina and Minister of Public Works Laureano Gómez in Bucaramanga, 1926 144 11. Ignacio Torres Giraldo, María Cano, Raúl Eduardo Mahecha, and Sofía López 165 12. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 1946 292 13. Laureano Gómez at home, mid-1940s 297 14. Laureano Gómez and Mariano Ospina Pérez shortly before April 9, 1948 308 15. Looters in Bogotá, April 9, 1948 315 16. Alfonso López Pumarejo and Mariano Ospina Pérez, with President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, May 1953 365 17. A guerrilla father greets his soldier son during the surrenders in Tolima, September 1953 367 18. Laureano Gómez and Alberto Lleras Camargo in Sitges, Spain, July 1957 383 19. The Carrera Thirty complex 415 20. Laureano Gómez congratulates Alfonso López Pumarejo on the latter’s receipt of a doctorate honoris causa, May 1962 419 Acknowledgments I am indebted to many people and institutions for their encouragement and support during my years of work on this book. My wife, Linda, my children, and my parents were especially understanding of my need to devote time and attention to “the Gómez study.” My colleagues at Coastal Carolina University were supportive in many ways. Members of Coastal’s Department of Politics and International Studies collegially supported my request for leave from teaching duties during 1990–91, when I wrote the first half of this volume. Our departmental administrative assistant, Bonnie Senser, was unfailingly helpful and good-humored. Faculty of the Reference Department at the university’s Kimbel Library—Margaret Fain, Marchita Phifer, and Blake Deegan—helped me locate hard-to-find volumes on Colombian history via interlibrary loan. Tabby Shelton spent many hours reformatting the manuscript. Colombianists Jane Rausch of the University of Massachusetts and Mau- rice Brungardt of Loyola University of New Orleans made invaluable sugges- tions in helping me ready the manuscript for publication. A great many Colombians aided my research. Especially helpful were Al- varo Gómez Hurtado, Roberto Herrera Soto, Alberto Bermúdez, and staff of the Sala de Investigadores of the National Library in Bogotá. Institutional support was provided by both the University of South Caro- lina and Coastal Carolina University, and by my previous employer, Gram- bling State University in Louisiana. The American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council for International Ex- change of Scholars, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board provided generous assistance that allowed me to work a total of three years on this project in Colombia, between 1980 and 1993. I am deeply grateful to all these people and institutions. Introduction Colombia is a country best described in superlatives. Its mountains are South America’s most verdant, its coffee the mildest, its red tape the most vexing, and its system of public transportation the world’s cheapest and most accessible. Colombian history is the hemisphere’s most confounding. And its transition to modernity has been the most abrupt. Over most of the present century its civil life has been the most consistently violent of any American republic. These things make Colombia an intriguing, compelling place, all the more so when one comes to know Colombians, their civility, their patience before adversity. The extraordinary complexity of Colombia’s recent past stands in sharp contrast to the unremarkable character of its nineteenth-century history. As elsewhere in Latin America, the country’s social calm was regularly punctuated by civil wars in which members of the social and political elite led armies in contests whose goal was overthrow of the central government. During lapses between civil wars, Colombian society reverted to its sleepy premodern character. Campesino soldiers put aside their rifles and returned to the land. Like the rest of Latin America, Colombia was an intensely rural place whose people were locked in a seignorial system characterized by extreme social inequality, hierarchy, and networks of reciprocal interdependence. Kinship ties, and those of clientage, were the chief forces of cohesion in the premodern nation. In the nineteenth century, before the rapid and violent social change that is the chief focus of this study, Colombia was more static than most other Latin American nations. Lacking lucrative exports—coffee not yet having loomed large in the national economy—foreigners and foreign capital kept their dis- tance. Colombians traveled little, for there was little reason to do so. Not much money circulated, and there were few consumer goods to be had, even by those lucky enough to possess discretionary income. Inward looking and parochial, Colombians were shut away in a mountain fastness that separated them al- most as effectively from one another as from the wider world. The study that follows traces Colombia’s transition from nineteenth-century social stasis, isolation, and poverty, to rapid integration into the global market economy during the first third of the twentieth century. Burgeoning xiv | Introduction coffee exports gave impetus to the physical development that national leaders had long sought. Thanks largely to coffee Colombia rapidly became a mobile and acquisitive society whose chief feature was an aggressive rural middle class. Conservative Party politician Laureano Gómez stands at the center of the present work. Gómez’s life spanned the era during which Colombian society became increasingly individualized and violent. Thoroughly schooled in his country’s tradition of political polemic shaped intellectually by militant Span- ish Jesuits, young Gómez was encouraged by his elders to become a crusader for religiously orthodox approaches to national affairs. First a newspaperman, then a politician, Laureano Gómez became his nation’s greatest orator and parliamentarian at a moment when eloquence in representative bodies was prized above all else.

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