God's Angry Man

In Bogota's plush-and-gold Colon theater, 500 blue-ribboned Conservative delegates last week nominated pouchy-eyed Laureano Gomez, 60, as their candidate in next month's presidential elections. In Colombia, which has seen little peace since the Bogota uprising of April 9, 1948, this amounted to a declaration of bitter political--if not civil--war.

Laureano (no other name is needed to identify him in Colombia) is the country's Mr. Conservative, a blown-in-the-bottle Bourbon whom Liberals passionately hate. On the night of the April 9 riots, mobs of frenzied men seeking to avenge the assassination of Liberal Chieftain Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, surged through Bogota's gutted streets screaming: "We want the head of Laureano!" At that time Laureano was presiding over the Bogota hemispheric conference as Colombia's foreign minister. He barely escaped the rioters (they burned down his house and the plant of his newspaper El Siglo) and took refuge for a year in Franco Spain.

For 18 years the Conservative candidate has been his party's unchallenged boss. He is credited with having driven three Presidents from office, two Conservatives and one Liberal. A reactionary Roman Catholic, he scourged the Vatican for signing a concordat with a Liberal government in 1942. In World War II he damned the U.S. as "pagan," plumped for the Axis until he saw that it was losing.

Most Sincere. Three years ago Laureano put up moderate Mariano Ospina Perez for president. Ospina won because of a Liberal split. Many thought Laureano might have the good sense to put up another moderate this year. But the fires of April 9 burned too brightly in his memory. Liberals, moreover, heaped on fresh fuel. United behind middle-of-the-road Dario Echandia, and fed to the teeth by unsuppressed rural political violence (392 deaths in September according to the Liberals), they used their congressional majority to advance the election date six months to Nov. 27 in expectation of a quick victory.

Laureano, his angry face as red-veined as a banknote, met this challenge personally. "When Conservative lips proclaim peace," he told the nominating convention last week, "they do so with sincerity. Our hearts are not poisoned with hateful desires to destroy the Christian order and replace it with Communist tyranny. We offer peace in the fullest sense of liberty and justice."

Most Hated. For his kind of peace, Laureano was prepared to fight with the government's full power. Even before the convention began, an old Laureano henchman took over the key Interior ministry from a non-political army officer. Two Laureano men assumed governorships, more were ticketed for other crucial states. The Liberals in Congress countered with a law allowing citizens to vote anywhere. This would enable Liberals to vote in other towns if run out of their homes in Conservative-bossed villages.

By nominating the man Liberals hated most, Conservatives had made sure that Colombia would see as bitter a campaign as any in modern times.

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