Virgilio Barco
Virgilio Barco declared war on the Medellin cartel and buried three presidential candidates in eight months. He was an engineer trained in the United States, a former mayor of Bogota and ambassador in Washington, and he won the presidency in 1986 with the largest margin in Colombian history - which he used to end the National Front's power-sharing convention and govern with a single-party cabinet and a recognised opposition, the first Colombian president in thirty years to do so. The opposition he recognised was killed. A left party formed out of a guerrilla demobilisation and legal politics lost between two and three thousand members to assassination during and after his term, two of them its own presidential candidates. The killing was done by paramilitaries, traffickers and members of the security forces, often working together. The lesson taken by the guerrillas who had not demobilised was that laying down arms was fatal, and it delayed a settlement by twenty-five years. In August 1989 the cartel had the leading candidate for the presidency shot at a rally outside Bogota. Barco responded that night with emergency decrees restoring extradition to the United States by executive order, and the state and the traffickers spent the following year in open war. It included an airliner bombed in flight with a hundred and seven aboard, the security police headquarters destroyed by a bus bomb, more than five hundred police killed in Medellin, judges and journalists murdered in numbers that emptied the courts. He handed over in 1990 to a candidate who had replaced one of the dead, and the cartel's leader was cornered and shot three years later.
- Lived: 1921 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
