Julio César Turbay
Julio César Turbay was president of Colombia from 1978 to 1982, the Liberal machine politician of Lebanese descent who won the election of 1978 by a hundred and fifty thousand votes on the lowest turnout the country had seen. His four years were the security statute of September 1978, the decree that gave the army the powers it had asked López Michelsen for and that the country's human rights movement was founded to fight. He was born in Bogotá, the son of a Lebanese immigrant merchant, a Liberal councillor at twenty-two who never left the party's machinery, a senator, a foreign minister under Lleras Camargo, an ambassador, and the man the party's bosses chose in 1978 over Lleras Restrepo's reformers because he owed them, which the country summarised in the bow tie he wore and the jokes it told about him and he told about himself. The statute was the reign. There were the military courts for civilians, the detention without charge, and the raids in Bogotá in 1979 after the M-19 tunnelled into the army's arsenal at Cantón Norte and took five thousand weapons. There was the torture in the cavalry school at Usaquén that the human rights mission of 1980 documented and he called interference. There were the trial of the M-19's leaders before a court martial, and the Dominican embassy siege of February to April 1980, in which the M-19 held fourteen ambassadors, the American among them, for sixty-one days and flew to Cuba with a ransom. That was the moment the country's guerrillas became its spectacle. The rest was the cocaine. There were the Medellín traffickers' money buying the Congress and the football clubs, and the extradition treaty with the United States signed in 1979, which was the beginning of the war the next three presidents fought. There were the MAS death squad the traffickers founded in 1981 after the M-19 kidnapped a Ochoa daughter, the Palace of Justice not yet burned, and the Peace Commission under Lleras Restrepo that he appointed in 1981 and whose members resigned when he would not lift the statute. There was the amnesty law of 1981 that nobody took. He lifted the state of siege in June 1982, six weeks before leaving office, so that Betancur should inherit a country in law. He was ambassador to the Vatican and to London afterwards, the party's elder. He was the man whose daughter Diana, a journalist, was kidnapped by Escobar in 1990 and killed in the rescue attempt of January 1991, which was the cartel's answer to the treaty he had signed. He died in Bogotá in September 2005, at eighty-nine.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, politician
