Shortly before 1 p.m., a light rain swept across Bogotá, wetting the columns of the Capitolio. There the ninth International Conference of American States had been in session for a fortnight on matters of high moment to the hemisphere—the industrial upbuilding of Latin America, the problem of Communism in the Americas. As the rain began to fall, most meetings adjourned for lunch.
Six blocks down the street, a short, muscular lawyer with piercing black eyes stepped briskly out of his office. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, rabble-rousing leader of Colombia's Liberal Party, was also luncheon-bound. As he crossed the sidewalk, a man with a pistol in his hand slipped up behind him, fired four shots into his neck and shoulders.
Like a man who had been bludgeoned, Gaitán fell, face down, and bloodstains widened on the sidewalk. A lottery vendor, standing in the doorway, dropped his book, grabbed the assassin and shouted: "This is the man." A café patron ran from another door, smashed a chair over the gunman's head.
A clotting crowd tore off his clothes, pounded him with shoeshine boxes snatched from ragged urchins, kicked his face and head into a bloody pulp. Then they knotted a tie around his neck and dragged him six blocks. All afternoon his body lay in the gutter before the Presidential Palace while the rain water made little whirlpools around his bare heels. Gaitán had been picked up and carried to the Clínica Central.
Two Flags. To Colombia's working classes, Gaitán had been an enshrined hero. For a month, they had burned with resentment because Conservative Party Leader Laureano Gómez had kept him from being a delegate to the International Conference. As Gaitán lay on the surgeon's table, his hysterical supporters stormed the Capitolio, screaming, "Death to Laureano Gómez!"
Thin-lipped Rightist Gómez, Foreign Minister, president of the conference and backbone of the government of gentle President Mariano Ospina Pérez, was not there. But the rioters poured in anyhow. They threw typewriters out of windows, splintered furniture, tore up records.
In mid-afternoon the word spread: Gaitán was dead. The mob, which had quieted under the efficient handling of federal troops, went mad. Its members drove into the Cundinamarca building (provincial capitol), set fire to Gómez' Conservative newspaper El Siglo. They hurled stones through the windows of the President's palace. Across the city (pop. 400,000) smoke swirled from mob-struck buildings. Federal troops and police were powerless.
Bombs & Machetes. In the fire-blackened three days that followed, conference delegates escaped injury. The Mexicans walked out of the Capitolio in the first hour of the uprising, carrying their tricolor flag. Secretary of State George Marshall, at his suburban residence, was safe but marooned.