Alberto Lleras Camargo
Alberto Lleras Camargo was president of Colombia twice, for a year in 1945 and 1946 to finish the elder López's term, and from 1958 to 1962 as the first president of the National Front, the sixteen-year pact by which the Liberals and Conservatives alternated the presidency and split every office in half to end the Violencia. He negotiated it with Laureano Gómez at Benidorm and Sitges in 1956 and 1957. It is the arrangement the country's politics ran on until 1974 and, in its habits, since. He was a journalist from Bogotá, a Liberal editor at twenty, and the elder López's minister of government at thirty in the revolution on the march. He was the president for a year when the president resigned in 1945, in which he held the election of 1946 that the divided Liberals lost to Ospina. He was then the first secretary-general of the Organisation of American States from 1948 to 1954, which he ran from Washington while the country he had left killed itself, and the rector of the University of the Andes. The Front was his idea and Gómez's concession. After Rojas Pinilla, the two parties that had fought the Violencia agreed in the pact of Benidorm in July 1956 and the declaration of Sitges in July 1957 to alternate and to share. The plebiscite of December 1957 approved it with four million votes to two hundred thousand. He was elected in May 1958 with eighty per cent as the Liberal the Conservatives had agreed to. The four years were the end of the war and the beginning of the state. There were the deaths down to a few thousand a year, and the rehabilitation programme for the regions the Violencia had emptied. There was the agrarian reform institute INCORA of 1961, which was the Alliance for Progress's condition. There was the Alliance itself, whose charter Kennedy and he signed and whose showcase Kennedy came to Bogotá in December 1961 to visit. There were the break with Cuba in December 1961, the development plan, and the bandits of the late Violencia, Sangrenegra and Chispas, hunted through the Tolima by the army while the Communist zones in Marquetalia were left alone for the time being. He handed over to the Conservative Valencia in 1962 as the pact required. He edited the magazine Visión, wrote his memoirs, and died in Bogotá in January 1990, at eighty-three. He was the president the country's liberals cite and the one whose pact its critics say closed the system that the guerrillas then spent forty years shooting at.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, journalist, politician
