Jorge Eliecer Gaitan

Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot in a Bogota street in April 1948 and his death began a civil conflict that has not entirely stopped. He was a lawyer of modest and partly Indigenous background who made his name in 1929 investigating the massacre of striking banana workers by the Colombian army at Cienaga, on behalf of the United Fruit Company's interests - the episode Garcia Marquez put into One Hundred Years of Solitude. He built a political career on the distinction between the political country and the national country, arguing that both Liberal and Conservative establishments were the same oligarchy, and he was an orator of a kind Colombia had not had: enormous silent marches, a following among the urban poor, and a Liberal party leadership he had taken from its owners. He was expected to win the 1950 election. On 9 April 1948, during the Pan-American Conference in the city, he was shot three times outside his office by a man the crowd beat to death immediately, which destroyed the evidence. The riot that followed - the Bogotazo - burned the centre of the capital and killed perhaps three thousand people. The decade of party warfare called La Violencia grew out of it, killed something like two hundred thousand, and produced the guerrilla movements of the 1960s. Fidel Castro, then a law student, was in Bogota for a rival student congress and had an appointment with Gaitan that afternoon; he ended up in the rioting and described it for the rest of his life as his political education. Whether the assassin acted alone has never been settled, and the crowd's lynching of him is the reason. Colombia has held commissions into it as recently as the 2000s.

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