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Most U.S. correspondents were in the Astor Hotel and they had a grandstand view of the fighting, in which 300 died. Cabled TIME Correspondent Tom Dozier: "Outside the hotel lie the bodies of two men and one woman who climbed atop one of the tanks that moved through the mob to defend the Presidential Palace. Government riflemen lying prone in the street popped them off at short range. One fell beneath the tank's treads and his head was crushed. It is not a pretty sight. . . .
"Bogotá looks more like a blitzed city than one that has been through a near-revolution. Dozens of "buildings are burned, hundreds of stores wrecked and looted.
"When I walked from the hotel to the cable office, about eight blocks, I stumbled over bodies and debris. To escape soldiers' and snipers' bullets I crouched in doorways, flattened myself against walls, dashed across exposed street corners. The government has announced that calm reigns in Bogotá, but it is a strange calm. Every few minutes there is heavy firing. The troops are still trying to clean out snipers."
Hangover. Fifteen minutes after Gaitán died. Don Fabio Lozano y Lozano, Liberal who had been War Minister until Conservative Ospina Pérez scrapped his coalition cabinet last month, knocked at the door of the Presidential Palace. Soon other Liberals arrived. The result was a new coalition cabinet in which Liberals held half the seats. Its strong man: Darío Echandía, vigorous middle-of-the-roader and new Liberal leader, who took the key post of Minister of the Interior. Laureano Gómez was out.
President Ospina Pérez went on the radio, denounced Gaitán's assassination, blamed the Communists for the upheaval that had stained Colombia's longtime reputation for orderly and democratic rule. This week, as a postscript, Colombia broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
Gaitán's assassin was too battered to be identified. But whether Gaitán had been killed by a Communist or not, the Red comrades showed that they knew how to make the most of the situation. The rapidity with which the disorders spread through Bogotá and then to other Colombian cities certainly indicated skilled direction, if not considerable planning. And the result suited the party, right down to the ground. Said the New York Daily Worker: "Interruption of the Foreign Ministers' parley is a sock in the jaw to the Big Business men of the State Department."
Decision. As the gunfire died away and Bogotá lay desolate, looted, gutted and under martial law, heads of conference delegations met to decide whether to stay in Bogotá or to go home. In Santiago, the Chilean government declared that the conference must go on. Not all Latin-American countries were so sure. Finally the delegates made their decision: "To continue the important work with which the governments have charged them until they have fully completed the task . . . for which they were convened." But that did not necessarily mean that the conference would stay in ruined Bogotá. There was doubt that shamefaced Colombia could continue as host to the great meeting of the Americas.