COLOMBIA: Hell-Bent for Election

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In 98% Roman Catholic Colombia, President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla started out smoothly enough with the church. In his first inaugural address in 1954 he announced that "we are Catholics, just as other nations are Buddhist or Mohammedan. Protestant propaganda is not proper in a nation like Colombia." Since then

Rojas' relations with the church have cooled notably, but it still came as a shock last week when a leading Catholic archbishop pointedly endorsed the anti-Rojas presidential candidate of the united Liberal-Conservative opposition, Guillermo Leon Valencia (TIME, April 22).

The church first fell out with Rojas Pinilla in March last year after government thugs staged a wild scene of beating and maiming spectators in a Bogota bull ring for having jeered his ambitious, unpopular daughter Maria at an earlier bullfight. Rojas Pinilla collided with the church again last June when he tried to form a Perón-like political "third force" by ordering his followers to swear a loyalty oath in religious terms. Colombia's Catholic primate, Crisanto Cardinal Luque, condemned the oath as "illicit" and the suggested party as "dangerous." That experiment was hastily abandoned.

When Rojas Pinilla banned a joint Liberal-Conservative meeting last week in Candidate Valencia's home town of Popayan, church officials took direct action. The Most Rev. Diego Maria Gomez, influential archbishop of Popayan, Cauca department and southwestern Colombia, invited the opposition delegates to meet in his palace. Privately he told the gathered politicians that he expected Cardinal Luque to take "a firmer hand" in any dealings with the government. And he called the nomination of Moderate Conservative Valencia a "fortunate choice."

Rojas Pinilla, meanwhile, continued to march resolutely down the re-election trail. At the first session of his brand-new, hand-picked Constituent Assembly last week, a legislative bill was prepared to "suspend Article 171 and the prohibitions contained in Article 129 of the National Constitution." Article 171 states that "all male citizens elect ... the President." Article 129 prohibits a President from succeeding himself. The Constituent Assembly can be counted on to dispose of such minor stumbling blocks with neat efficiency. The obvious next step: Rojas Pinilla's unanimous re-election by the cooperative Assembly. After that, clearly, it would not be necessary to bother Colombia's male citizenry with any election at all.