Word: mez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 last...
Under two dictators-Laureano Gómez and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla-Protestant missionaries in the Colombian backwoods were victims of a nine-year campaign of terror and violence aimed at chasing them out of the country. They were jailed, beaten, run out of town. Their schools and churches were padlocked, sometimes burned and dynamited, and it was decreed unlawful for any Protestant missionary to minister to any Colombian citizen. Last week, with Rojas five months gone, there were signs that the anti-Protestant pressure was easing...
...Catholic Colombia, hatred of Protestants-especially the active, evangelistic denominations-has long been cultivated. Ever since 1887, when Roman Catholicism became the country's official religion, Catholics found a lively response to whispering campaigns against the threat of Protestantism. Conservative Party Dictator Gómez was convinced that all Protestants were members of the Liberal Party and hence his mortal enemies. Just before Gómez was overthrown by Rojas in 1953, his government signed an agreement with the Vatican cutting two-thirds of the country into 18 mission territories in which only Catholic churches and schools could operate...
Since the return of onetime Liberal President Alberto Lleras Camargo from a peace-making meeting with Conservative ex-President Laureano Gómez in Sitges, Spain (TIME, Aug. 12), relations between the two parties have been warmly cordial. The agreement drawn up jointly by Lleras Camargo and Gómez, which provides that during the next three four-year administrations, Cabinet posts, Congress seats, state legislatures and town councils will be arbitrarily divided 50-50 between the two parties, was the basis for the document presented to the junta last week...