César Gaviria
César Gaviria was president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, the forty-three-year-old economist who had been the campaign manager of Luis Carlos Galán and took his candidacy when Escobar's gunmen killed Galán on a platform in August 1989, winning the election of May 1990 in which two other candidates were also murdered. He gave the country the constitution of 1991, written by an elected assembly in which the demobilised M-19 guerrillas held a third of the seats. It had a bill of rights, a constitutional court, the tutela action that lets any citizen demand a judge's protection in ten days, elected governors, and a ban on extradition that was Escobar's price for surrendering to the prison he had built himself at Envigado, La Catedral, from which he walked out in July 1992 when the government tried to move him, and where the hunt that killed him on a Medellín roof in December 1993 began. The apertura, the opening of the economy to trade and foreign capital, was also his. It was the beginning of the peso's long appreciation and of the farmers' complaint. He was born in Pereira in 1947, studied economics at the Andes university, was mayor of Pereira at twenty-seven, a congressman from 1978. He was Barco's finance and then interior minister in the 1980s, in which second office he negotiated the M-19's peace. The narco-terrorism of the Medellín cartel, the airliner bombed in the air in 1989 and the car bombs in Bogotá, was answered by the surrender policy that gave reduced sentences for confession, which the Cali cartel used while Medellín's was destroyed. The FARC and ELN, which had refused the assembly, were attacked at Casa Verde on the day of its election in December 1990, and the war went on. The electricity rationing of 1992, after a drought and a decade of unbuilt plants, cost the government a year of blackouts. He was secretary-general of the Organization of American States from 1994 to 2004, where he managed the Peruvian crisis of 2000 and the Venezuelan of 2002-04. He led the Liberal Party from 2005 to 2009, and has since been the leading voice in the region for the decriminalisation of drugs, having spent his presidency fighting the war that made him.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, politician
