Background
Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was born in Bogota on 23 January 1898 into a lower middle-class family. His father was a bookseller and his mother a schoolteacher and early advocate of women’s rights.
Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was born in Bogota on 23 January 1898 into a lower middle-class family. His father was a bookseller and his mother a schoolteacher and early advocate of women’s rights.
Educated by his mother and in private schools, he later earned a law degree at the National University, and another at the University of Rome, where he also studied the techniques of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader.
Gaitán first won national prominence during congressional debates over the Abadía Méndez administration’s handling of strikes in the “banana zone" in 1928-1929. After investigating an army massacre of workers, he made a series of sensational speeches that exposed complicity of high government officials with the foreign-owned banana company. His revelations made him a nationalist hero, and he quickly became a leading Liberal Party figure and member of the party’s directorate. In Congress, he proposed legislation, including agrarian reform, protection of workers’ rights, and social welfare measures.
Frustration over failure to bring about passage of progressive legislation resulted in his organizing the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (UNIR). Based on a union of unorganized urban workers, rural laborers, and small landowners, UNIR was short-lived (1934-1935). When the Liberal administration of Alfonso López Pumarejo initiated reforms in the mid-1930s, Gaitán abandoned UNIR and again assumed a leadership role in the Liberal Party. He served briefly as mayor of Bogotá and as minister of education and minister of labor. He also was elected to the Senate.
During the early 1940s, years of political turmoil and economic dislocation, Gaitán remained somewhat apart from struggles that were factionalizing the Liberal and Conservative parties. In 1944, however, as the second López administration dissolved in chaos, Gaitán launched a campaign for the presidency and organized a populist movement which cut across class and party lines, appealing to urban and rural working classes and emerging middle sectors. His program called for sweeping social and economic changes in the interests of the country’s poor. It was a movement, radical in the context of the times, that threatened the entire structure dominated by what Gaitán called the ruling “oligarchy.”
When the Liberal Party made Gabriel Turbay its official presidential candidate, Gaitán refused to retire from the race. This Liberal split resulted in election of the Conservative, Mariano Ospina Pérez, in 1946. Gaitán then set out to capture leadership of the Liberal Party, which was in complete disarray. He did so in 1947 and began to reorient the party in a more progressive direction. Accelerating violence in the countryside between the majority Liberals and the minority but ruling Conservatives, however, increasingly occupied his attention. The violence was exacerbated by Conservative efforts to consolidate power and throttle growing demands for social and economic changes. Gaitán himself became a victim. An assassin fatally shot him on a Bogotá street on April 9, 1948.