Word: bogota
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Political Passion. Ever since the tragic Bogota uprising of April 9, 1948, Colombia had been drifting toward just such a moment of force. Liberals, having healed the division that cost them the presidency in 1946, used their congressional majority to push the election date seven months forward in expectation of victory. The Conservative reply, in an atmosphere hot with political passion, was to choose their most inflammatory rightist, Franco-loving Laureano Gomez, as their nominee, and to throw every government resource into his campaign...
...Bogota's plush-and-gold Colon theater, 500 blue-ribboned Conservative delegates last week nominated pouchy-eyed Laureano Gomez, 60, as their candidate in next month's presidential elections. In Colombia, which has seen little peace since the Bogota uprising of April 9, 1948, this amounted to a declaration of bitter political-if not civil...
...needed to identify him in Colombia) is the country's Mr. Conservative, a blown-in-the-bottle Bourbon whom Liberals passionately hate. On the night of the April 9 riots, mobs of frenzied men seeking to avenge the assassination of Liberal Chieftain Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, surged through Bogota's gutted streets screaming: "We want the head of Laureano!" At that time Laureano was presiding over the Bogota hemispheric conference as Colombia's foreign minister. He barely escaped the rioters (they burned down his house and the plant of his newspaper El Siglo) and took refuge...
...with a coalition cabinet. Ospina brushed off diehard Conservative pressure to crush the opposition by high-handed use of his powers. Last year, when enraged followers of assassinated Liberal Chieftain Jorge Eliécer Gaitan sacked his capital, Ospina refused Liberal demands for his resignation. Though snipers peppered his Bogota office from nearby steeples and buildings, he sat imperturbably at his desk. "Better for Colombia a dead President," he said, "than for me to run away...
...subject to tax whether oil was found or not. Extra-legal riders of one sort or another jacked royalties as high as 25%; the total government take, in taxes and royalties, sometimes ran over half the value of a company's net revenue. "Colombia," growled an oilman in Bogota, "is the graveyard of oil profits from other countries...