Carlos Lleras Restrepo
Carlos Lleras Restrepo was president of Colombia from 1966 to 1970, the third president of the National Front and the one who tried to make it govern. He was the economist and Liberal party manager whose four years were the constitutional reform of 1968, the agrarian reform pushed as far as the landowners would let it, the exchange-control statute that ran the economy for twenty years, and the peasant organisation that his successors dismantled. He was born in Bogotá, a cousin of Alberto Lleras. He was a lawyer and the Liberal party's president at twenty-seven, the elder López's finance minister and comptroller. He was a senator through the Violencia who was beaten in the street by Conservative police in 1952 and went to Mexico. He was the author, with the elder Lleras, of the Front's economic clauses. The presidency was the state's modernisation. There was the constitutional reform of December 1968 that gave the president the economic emergency powers and the planning, moved the budget's initiative to the executive and the Front's parity out of the Congress by 1974. There was the decree 444 of 1967 that fixed the peso's crawling devaluation and the exchange controls, after he had refused the IMF's devaluation in November 1966 on television, and the export promotion that followed it. There were the Andean Pact signed at Cartagena in 1969 with Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and the agrarian reform of 1968, which put the INCORA to work at last and titled land to a hundred thousand families before the landowners' counter-attack of the Chicoral pact of 1972 stopped it. There was the National Association of Peasant Users, ANUC, founded by the state in 1967 to press the reform from below, a million members by 1970. It then invaded the estates on its own account and was broken. The end was the election of April 1970 that his Front's candidate Pastrana Borrero won by sixty thousand votes over Rojas Pinilla, or did not. The count stopped at midnight with Rojas ahead and resumed in the morning with Pastrana, under a curfew he declared. That was the night the M-19 was named for. He edited the magazine Nueva Frontera and wrote a memoir in six volumes. He was the Liberal party's conscience and its scold through the 1980s. He died in Bogotá in September 1994, at eighty-six. He was the president the technocrats cite as the one who built the state they run.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 1994 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
