Belisario Betancur

Belisario Betancur opened the first peace talks with Colombia's guerrillas and presided over two catastrophes that defined how the country remembers him. He was the second of twenty-two children of a muleteer in Amaga, Antioquia, of whom most died in infancy; he was educated in a seminary, took a law degree, and came up through the Conservative Party as a journalist and minister of labour. He lost the presidency in 1978 and won it in 1982. He broke with the practice of treating insurgency purely as a military problem, declared an amnesty, and signed the Uribe accords with the FARC in 1984, out of which the Patriotic Union party was formed - and whose members were then murdered in the thousands over the following decade. His justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla was assassinated in April 1984, and Betancur responded by declaring a state of siege and beginning extraditions to the United States, reversing his own earlier position. In November 1985 the M-19 seized the Palace of Justice in Bogota; the army retook it with tanks and fire, and around a hundred people died including eleven Supreme Court justices, with several cafeteria workers disappeared afterwards. Betancur accepted full political responsibility publicly and was later found by a truth commission to have lost control of the military during the operation. Nine days later the Nevado del Ruiz eruption buried Armero and killed some twenty-three thousand people, after warnings that were not acted on. He spent his long retirement in cultural and academic work. He wrote poetry and translated it, and directed cultural foundations for decades after leaving office. He kept Colombia out of the International Monetary Fund's adjustment programmes in the debt crisis of the early 1980s, on terms other Latin American governments did not obtain. He died in Bogota at ninety-five.

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