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In April 1948, after the assassination of the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, crowds poured into the streets of Bogotá. Buildings burned. Churches were looted. Armed mobs seized parts of the capital. Gaitán—a labor lawyer turned political phenomenon who seemed poised to become Colombia’s next Liberal president—had built a mass following among working-class Colombians frustrated by inequality and elite rule. An enraged crowd beat the alleged gunman to death before his motives could be revealed. Gaitán’s killing triggered El Bogotazo, the explosion of unrest that marked the beginning of La Violencia, the brutal conflict between Liberals and Conservatives that would kill more than 200,000 Colombians over the following decade.
In 1950, an article in The Atlantic warned that Colombia’s “promising democracy” was beginning to come apart. An unnamed writer noted that the country had functioned “more consistently and over a longer period than any other Latin American republic,” but that its government was faltering. Across rural Colombia, Liberal and Conservative elites backed armed supporters who fought to defend each party’s political power and economic interests. The country’s leaders seemed to govern by intimidation: opposition meetings broken up in small towns, armed groups terrorizing voters, emergency decrees restricting democratic life.
More than 70 years later, familiar patterns are emerging as Colombia heads into one of its most consequential elections in years. On Sunday, Colombians will vote for a successor to President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist president and a former member of the Marxist M-19 guerrilla movement. Petro came into office promising to negotiate cease-fires with every major armed group still operating in Colombia, but many of these talks eventually stalled or collapsed. He suspended negotiations last year with the National Liberation Army, or ELN—now Colombia’s largest active guerrilla group—after it launched an offensive in northeastern Colombia that killed more than 30 people. Still, even as Petro’s peace agenda has faltered, several armed groups, including the ELN, have signaled that they may be open to restarting negotiations with the next government.
The election has become a referendum on Petro’s “total peace” strategy. His supporters say that Colombia cannot end decades of conflict through military force alone; the Petro ally and presidential candidate Iván Cepeda has promised to continue the negotiations. His Conservative rival Paloma Valencia and the right-wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella are each campaigning on restoring security through a strong military response, arguing that Petro’s approach allowed armed factions to regroup and expand their territorial control, particularly in rural and border regions.
The debate has become inextricable from the country’s deteriorating security situation. Although the cities, where much of the country’s wealth and political power are concentrated, have become safer and stabler over the past decades, armed groups have staged dozens of bombings and drone strikes across Colombia in recent months. Dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC—the far-left guerrilla group that fought the Colombian state for more than 50 years before signing a landmark peace agreement in 2016—were behind several of the attacks, targeting civilians and military bases just weeks before the election. Some factions never fully demobilized after the accord, while others later splintered from the peace process entirely. Especially during election cycles, these insurgents use violence to protect their illegal economies and to demonstrate their continued power in regions where they often have a stronger presence than the state itself.
The race has felt, at times, like a dispatch from 1948. Last summer, a Colombian senator and presidential hopeful, Miguel Uribe Turbay, was shot during a campaign rally in Bogotá and died two months later. A 15-year-old hit man and eight others were arrested for the shooting, and the country’s attorney general has issued warrants against leaders of the Segunda Marquetalia, an offshoot of FARC, in relation to the assasination. Earlier this month, a former mayor and a staffer allied with the presidential candidate de la Espriella were shot dead (the shooters have not been apprehended). Colombia’s public-defender’s office warned that the killings could threaten “democratic participation” ahead of the vote.
When an unbylined Atlantic writer covered Colombia in 1963, the country looked very different. Exhausted by years of bloodshed, the Liberal and Conservative parties had agreed to share power through a coalition known as the National Front, alternating the presidency and dividing government positions between them. The article describes a country trying to steady itself after chaos, building roads and housing projects, attracting foreign investment, and projecting an air of stability after years of partisan violence.
Still, beneath that stability, the writer detected problems, such as economic woes and oligarchic tendencies, that had not so much disappeared as hardened. The coalition government’s success, the writer observed, would ultimately depend on whether it could address “urban squalor and rural poverty, whose victims are being aroused to a sense of their own strength.” Those lingering tensions would soon reshape Colombia again. A year after the article was published, the FARC and the ELN emerged as separate militias. A few decades later, presidential candidates, journalists, and judges were routinely assassinated by cartels, guerillas, and paramilitary groups warring with one another and with the state.
The 1950 article in The Atlantic ends without resolution: “What will remain of Colombia’s promising democracy after so long a period of restraint and turbulence remains to be seen.” Reading it now, amid another tense moment in Colombian politics shadowed by assassinations, bombings, and fear, that line feels like a question that Colombia has spent generations trying to answer.
More From the Archives
The Slow Food movement was born in 1986 when Carlo Petrini, an Italian environmental activist and former radio journalist, rallied a group of friends to protest the replacement of a beloved coffee shop in Rome with a McDonald’s. When a bystander asked what, if not fast food, he was in favor of, he said: “Slow food.” What did “slow food” actually mean? That was something Petrini, who died last week at the age of 76, would spend the next few years figuring out, eventually hatching an international movement that combined an embrace of sustainable farming and traditional cooking with an epicurean’s appreciation of good food. (Petrini would also found the University of Gastronomic Sciences, in Pollenzo, Italy, the first such institution in the world.)
In 1999, Corby Kummer, an Atlantic senior editor and a longtime food writer, helped introduce the Slow Food movement to America with his article “Doing Well by Eating Well.” “Appetite can join forces with radicalism,” he wrote, “and both sides can be the stronger” for it. That article would soon grow into the book The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors and Recipes.
As Kummer noted last week, Petrini showed people that they couldn’t enjoy a region’s best produce and cuisine “without recognizing the dignity and well-being of the people who make food, the importance of tradition and human contact, and social and environmental justice.”
— Scott Stossel, national editor
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