Word: laureano
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Laureano Gómez rode a wheelchair to the polls in Colombia last week-and rode away from the election a revitalized political strongman. Less than five years ago, Rightist Gómez was ousted by military coup from power as a hated dictator; only six months ago he returned from banishment in Spain. But when he put his leadership of the Conservative Party into the balance against the party's other factions in the voting, the strong-willed ex-dictator, now 69 and weakened by a series of four heart attacks, easily won. "He is," Colombians explained with...
...with tanks and troops (presumably for the President's protection) and argued forcefully that the prestige of all the armed forces hung on making concessions to the anti-dictatorial feelings of the rebels and their covert sympathizers. Almost from the beginning, the military men demanded the heads of Laureano Vallenilla Lanz and Pedro Estrada...
...another five years as President of Venezuela-barring, of course, assassination or a coup by his military juniors. He won the term in a plebiscite that gave voters a choice of him or nothing. So cynically rigged was the election that two hours after the polls closed, Interior Minister Laureano Vallenilla Lanz summoned foreign newsmen to hear the results. Just as a small television receiver in the corner of his office beamed the opening of the first ballot box, the minister, his .38-cal. revolver prominently displayed on his desk, said that the citizens had voted...
...office in 1945 during the election from which most of Colombia's recent political misery grew. A split among the Liberals let the minority-choice Conservative candidate win. Four years later, panicky Conservative leaders closed Congress, put Colombia under a state of siege, imposed their most forceful caudillo, Laureano Gómez, as President. Bitter interparty rural fighting, in which 20,000 died, finally led to a military dictatorship under General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Modest, brainy Alberto Lleras, meanwhile, moved to Washington and a prestigious appointment as Secretary General of the Organization of American States...
...Lleras gave up his plush OAS post, returned to Bogotá as a private citizen. Talking and writing, he made himself the sober advocate of truce in the passionate political war, of a return to political sanity. Then, flying to Spain, he sat down amicably with exiled Laureano Gómez, once furiously hated by all Liberals, and persuaded him to agree to the essentials of a plan for sharing power between the parties. The truce, giving promise of responsible civilian government in the future, played an important role when the present caretaker military junta took over from Rojas Pinilla...