Gustavo Rojas Pinilla

Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was president of Colombia from June 1953, when the army removed the Conservative Laureano Gómez in the only successful coup of the country's twentieth century, to May 1957, when a general strike and a junta of his own generals removed him. He was the engineer-general whom both parties welcomed as the man who would end the Violencia and then combined to remove when he seemed to be building a state of his own. He was born in Tunja. He trained as a civil engineer at Tri-State College in Indiana, came back to the army, and commanded the troops in Cali on 9 April 1948 who put down the Bogotazo's echo there. He was the armed forces' commander when Gómez, ill and governing through a deputy, tried to dismiss him, and the officers, the Liberals and the Conservatives of Ospina's wing all asked him to take the palace, which he did on 13 June 1953 without a shot. The four years were the pacification. There was the amnesty of 1953 that brought the Liberal guerrillas of the eastern plains in from the war, six thousand of them under Guadalupe Salcedo, who laid down their arms and were, many of them, killed afterwards, Salcedo in 1957 by the police. The deaths fell from fifty thousand a year to a few thousand. Then came the new violence of 1955 in the Sumapaz and the Tolima, where the army's war against the Communist peasants made the self-defence zones that the FARC came out of in 1964. The state was the general's. Television was brought to the country in 1954. There were the Atlantic railway and the Bogotá airport, the vote for women in 1954, and the National Secretariat of Social Assistance run by his daughter María Eugenia. There was the third force he announced in 1956 to replace the parties. There were the bullring massacre of February 1956 when his supporters beat the crowd that had booed his daughter, the students shot on the Carrera Séptima in June 1954, and the newspapers El Tiempo and El Espectador closed. There was the constituent assembly that re-elected him in 1957 for a term the parties, meeting at Sitges and Benidorm, had already agreed to share between themselves for sixteen years instead. He went to Spain in May 1957. He came back in 1958 to be tried by the Senate and stripped of his rights, and got them back in 1967. He founded the ANAPO, the populist party of the poor that came, in the election of April 1970, within sixty thousand votes of the presidency, or won it. The country has argued about since the count stopped that night and resumed in the morning with the National Front's candidate ahead. Out of it the M-19 guerrilla took its name. He died in Melgar in January 1975. His daughter carried the party until it dissolved. The general who was removed by the parties is the one the poor remembered.

Related

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history