Mariano Ospina Perez
Mariano Ospina Perez was president on the day the capital burned, and the decade that followed is the one Colombians call simply the Violence. He was an engineer and coffee grower from a family that had already given the country two presidents, and he won in 1946 because the Liberal party split its vote between two candidates - taking the presidency with forty-two per cent after sixteen years out of power. He formed a government with Liberal ministers and governed moderately for eighteen months. On 9 April 1948 the Liberal candidate for the next election, a populist who had built a following among the urban poor that neither party machine could control, was shot dead in the street in Bogota. The city rose within an hour: trams burned, the centre was gutted, and something between five hundred and three thousand people died in two days. A conference of American states was meeting in the city at the time, and among the students in it was a young Cuban lawyer. Ospina refused to resign, brought Liberals back into the cabinet, and held on. What the riot began did not stop. Partisan killing spread into the countryside, where it fused with land conflict and became something closer to a rural war; the accepted estimate is two hundred thousand dead between 1948 and 1958 and two million displaced. Ospina closed congress in November 1949 and governed by decree, the Liberals boycotted the election that followed, and the country ended the period under a military government and then under a pact by which the two parties agreed to alternate the presidency between them for sixteen years - a settlement that stopped the partisan killing and left no legal route to power for anybody else.
- Lived: 1891 CE – 1976 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
