Colombia: A Threat of Daggers

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Around the Caribbean, Latin Americans have a saying when senselessness creeps into affairs. "La banda está borracha," they shrug—"The band is drunk." In mountain-ridged, coffee-growing Colombia, the band went on its binge from 1948 to 1958, when the nation's two ruling parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, fell into an ugly civil war that killed 200,000 Colombians. The country has been suffering from the hangover ever since.

Last week's congressional elections show how painful the headache is. In an effort to end la violencia, Liberals and Conservatives* agreed in 1958 to unite in a National Front, with the presidency alternating between parties every four years, and a two-thirds majority required for all laws. Things calmed down all right; but without any real opposition to the ruling coalition, apathy ensued. With only 40% of Colombia's 7,000,000 adults going to the polls, the front last week won 102 seats in the 190-man House of Representatives, and 60 in the 106-man Senate —short of the needed two-thirds in both cases.

Lost Contact. The real winner was former Strongman Gustavo Rojas Pi-nilla, 66, a general who came to power with the aid of the military in 1953 as their unsuccessful candidate to end the vendetta and was removed by the military in 1957, after having disgusted Colombia with censorship and pilfering of public funds. Last week, though ignored throughout the campaign by TV and press, and personally forbidden to run, Rojas had the satisfaction of seeing his ANAPO party win half a million votes, 18% of the total—making him the unofficial and highly embarrassing leader of the opposition.

Leaders of the front knew all too well what had happened. Said Carlos Lleras Restrepo, 57, the Liberals' candidate for President next May: "The traditional parties have lost contact with a certain sector of the population." He meant the thousands of excampesinos who squat in squalid shacks surrounding Bogota and Cartagena and have been growing restive under the lackluster rule of Conservative President Guillermo León Valencia. During the campaign, Rojas drew enthusiastic crowds with his vivid lectures on economics, in which he argued that the way to get the peso on a par with the dollar was to "lock up all Colombians with money outside the country and not let them go until they bring back the $3 billion they have hidden abroad." His daughter Maria Eugenia Rojas de Moreno Diaz, 30, who ran for the Senate, turned up in the smaller towns to buy rice, yucca and corn at the marketplace. Then she set up a booth to resell them at a half or a third of the price, telling everyone, "This is how much it will cost after we win."