A Man to Reckon With

Few Latin American political events can any longer be unimportant to Americans--especially if they happen in Colombia. Colombia's 1,200-mile coastline faces both the Atlantic and the Pacific approaches of the Panama Canal. Its swamps and jungles cover potentially great (but unestimated) pools of petroleum, vital in modern war. Hence any stirring in Colombia's dense political underbrush is peculiarly significant.

Just now the bushes are being agitated by one Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, also known as El Negro (the Dark One), and "Captain of the People." Gaitan is a dapper, black-haired demagogue modeled somewhat along the lines of Louisiana's late Huey Long.

Colombia's major parties are Conservatives and Liberals. For 16 years, the Liberals had elected a President. But last year, Gaitan, running as a breakaway Liberal candidate, split his own party by attacking Gabriel Turbay, the official Liberal candidate. Colombia, cried Gaitan, needed a candidate issued from a "Colombian belly." Turbay's parents were Syrian.

The Liberals lost. Mariano Ospina Perez, the Conservative candidate, won. Gaitan ran third. But he polled a stupendous vote (about 358,957), mostly in the cities where the workers liked his brand of rabble-rousing. In Bogota, Colombia's capital, which calls itself the South American Athens, and in the ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla (but not in Medellin --see below), Gaitan received more votes than Ospina and Turbay together.

United Front. Promptly Colombia's small but active Communist Party (it claims 5.000 members but controls the C.T.C., the national labor federation) stopped shooting at the Gaitan bandwagon and climbed aboard. Together, Communists and Gaitan followers have now achieved a popular front agreement against both Liberals and Conservatives.

Not all Colombians are ravished by Gaitan's rhetoric. The press often gleefully reproduces his choicer metaphors. Sample: "I am the dynamo, but the people is the electric charge, and together we make an automobile." The contempt of El Tiempo, spokesman for the old-line Liberal Party, only convinced Gaitan that he needed his own mouthpiece. Last week he had it: La Jornada (The Working Day). As prose, La Jornada's fiery editorials did not compare with El Tiempo's. But they spoke the language of the restless masses who threaten to upset Colombia's old order. If his united front with the Communists stays united, Gaitan may be a factor to reckon with in Colombian politics.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.