Word: mez
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President Laureano Gómez, a harsh, angry, forbidding man, ruled.Colombia (pop.: 12,000,000) with a will so stern that other men instinctively cringed and obeyed him. More than any other Colombian of this century, he dominated his country's life. But one afternoon last week, ten of the Colombian army's tanks clanked up and took positions around his modest suburban house, and then-simply, surprisingly-Laureano Gómez, 64, slid like a wilted leaf down history's drainpipe...
Inflammatory Statesman. The presidency Laureano Gómez lost had been the goal of his entire life. As far to the right as his friend, Spain's Franco, he led and symbolized Colombia's Conservative Party during its long years out of power. In 1945, when the Liberals split over presidential candidates, he pushed the Conservatives' silver-haired Mariano Ospina Pérez into office. Ospina, under the willful thumb of Gómez, felt obliged to return the favor in 1949. Clamping on a state of siege, using military police to drive Liberals from the rural...
...mez never lifted martial law, instead used it to press a bloody civil war with the hated Liberals out in the countryside. The war brought death to perhaps 20,000 people. Never relenting, Gómez drove the Liberals clear out of public life. Struck down by two heart attacks, he went into partial retirement, gave some administrative chores to Acting President Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez, but kept the real power for himself...
...newspaper El Siglo, mouthpiece of ailing President Laureano Gómez, praised Bolivar's idea of rule by an elite. In editorials supposedly written by Gómez himself, El Siglo echoed Bolívar's dictum that "elections are the scourge of all republics," and upheld the Liberator's aristocratic approach to politics. Said El Siglo: "If the law is abnormal or inconvenient, push it to one side . . . Retain elasticity . . . though procedure may not always be strictly legal. The letter kills; the spirit gives life...
...permitted. Though the President had lined up the Liberator for his favorite constitutional ideas, many of his own Conservatives seemed loth to turn the clock back. Even in 1826, one warned, Colombians wanted no part of the Bolivarian constitution. Nevertheless, the President pressed for action. Senator Alvaro Gómez, his son, demanded "complete constitutional reform...