Background
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was born on 12 March 1900 in Tunja, Boyacá.
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was born on 12 March 1900 in Tunja, Boyacá.
He was educated at the Colombian military academy, where he received his commission in 1920. He also studied in the United States.
Rojas served in various posts throughout the country. In 1950 he was named head of the armed forces during a period of intense rural violence. In 1953 leading Liberal and moderate Conservative politicians urged the military to act against the rightist Conservative president, Laureano Gómez. In June, the military ousted Gómez and installed Rojas for a four-year term as president.
In 1970, Rojas came close to regaining power, when he lost to the Conservative Misael Pastrana Borrero by less than 60,000 votes. Rojas charged that he was defrauded in the official count, which was a possibility. Failing health forced him to take a less active role in ANAPO. That, combined with restoration of political competition following the end of the National Front, resulted in AN- APO’s poor showing in the 1974 election.
Rojas attempted limited social reforms to build a base of popular support. When his efforts began to threaten the U’aditional Conservative and Liberal parties, opposition increased. He responded by increasingly dictatorial methods, repressing the political parties. Economic problems and the inefficiency of his administration precipitated a nationwide strike and riots that finally led the military high command, supported by politicians of both parties, to force him from office in 1957.
Although temporarily stripped of his civil rights by the Senate, Rojas formed the Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) in 1961 and unsuccessfully ran for president the following year. He organized ANAPO into a cohesive opposition to the ruling Liberal-Conservative National Front, and in elections from the municipal to the national level, ANAPO candidates frequently won office. By the end of the 1960s ANAPO was a mass party, with organizations down to the ward level, rallies, membership cards and dues, party training schools, and party media. ANAPO was dominated by the personalist style of Rojas, assisted by his daughter Maria Eugenia Rojas de Moreno and her husband Samuel Moreno Diaz. It appealed for support principally to the ‘‘popular class,” which included the working classes, the poor, and those marginalized by the socioeconomic system. Support was solidified by distribution of food, clothing, and health services to the needy. ANAPO's ideological orientation was at best ambiguous; its programs were vaguely nationalist and developmentalist.
