Living to Tell the Tale (40 page)

The inflamed crowd poured into the street in a bloodless pitched battle, faced with the secret tolerance of the police. I believe that was the night when I understood at last the frustrations of my grandfather and the lucid analyses of Camilo Torres
Restrepo. It surprised me that at the Universidad Nacional the students continued to be Liberals and Goths with knots of Communists, but the breach Gaitán was excavating in the country was not felt there. I reached the
pensión
dazed by the turmoil of the night and found my roommate reading Ortega y Gasset in the peace of his bed.

“I’m a new man, Dr. Vega,” I said. “Now I know how and why the
wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez began.”

A few days later—on February 7, 1948—Gaitán held the first political ceremony I ever attended in my life: a procession for the countless victims of official violence in the country, with more than sixty thousand women and men in strict mourning, carrying the red flags of the party and the black flags of Liberal grief. There was only one rallying cry: absolute
silence. And it was maintained with inconceivable dramatic effect, even on the balconies of residences and offices where people watched us walk along the eleven crowded blocks of the main avenue. Beside me a woman murmured a prayer to herself. A man nearby looked at her in surprise:

“Señora, please!”

She moaned an apology and sank into an ocean of phantoms. What brought me to the verge of tears,
however, was the crowd’s careful steps and breathing in the supernatural silence. I had come without political conviction, drawn by the curiosity
of the silence, and the sudden knot of tears in my throat took me by surprise. Gaitán’s speech on the Plaza de Bolívar, from the balcony of the municipal comptroller’s office, was a funeral oration with an overwhelming emotional charge. Against the sinister
predictions of his own party, he ended with the most hazardous circumstance of his rallying cry: there was no applause at all.

That was the “march of silence,” the most moving of all the marches ever held in Colombia. The impression left after that historic afternoon, among his partisans and his enemies, was that Gaitán’s election was unstoppable. The Conservatives knew it as well, because of
the degree of depravity that the violence had reached all over the country, the ferocity shown by the regime’s police against unarmed Liberalism, and its scorched-earth policy. The darkest manifestation of the country’s state of mind was experienced that weekend by those who attended the bullfight in the Bogotá arena, when the people in the bleachers invaded the bullring, indignant at the tameness
of the bull and the inability of the bullfighter to kill it once and for all. The enraged crowd quartered the bull while it was still alive. Numerous reporters and writers who experienced the horror, or heard about it, interpreted this as the most frightening symptom of the brutal rage afflicting the country. In that climate of high tension the Ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogotá opened on March
30, at four-thirty in the afternoon. The city had been renovated at enormous cost, following the pompous esthetic of Minister of State Laureano Gómez, who by virtue of his position was president of the conference. The ministers of state of all the countries in Latin America attended, as well as important personages of the time. The most eminent Colombian politicians were invited as guests of
honor, with the unique exception of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, excluded no doubt by the very significant veto of Laureano Gómez, and perhaps by that of some Liberal leaders who despised him for his attacks on the oligarchy common to both parties. The polestar of the conference was General George Marshall, the delegate from the United States and the great hero of the recent war, who had the dazzling brilliance
of a film star because he was
directing the reconstruction of a Europe annihilated by the conflict.

But on Friday, April 9, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was the man of the day in the news because he had obtained the pardon of Lieutenant Jesús María Cortés Poveda, accused of killing the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa. Gaitán had been euphoric when he came to his law offices at the crowded intersection
of Carrera Séptima and Avenida Jiménez de Quesada, a little before eight in the morning, in spite of having been at court until the small hours. He had various appointments for the next few hours, but he accepted without hesitation when Plinio Mendoza Neira invited him to have lunch, a little before one o’clock, with six personal and political friends who had gone to his office to congratulate him
for the legal victory that the newspapers had not published yet. Among them was his personal physician, Pedro Eliseo Cruz, who was also a member of his political inner circle.

In that intense atmosphere, I sat down to have lunch in the dining room of the
pensión
where I lived, less than three blocks away. They had not yet served the soup when Wilfrido Mathieu came and stood in horror at my table.

“The country’s fucked,” he told me. “They just killed Gaitán in front of El Gato Negro.”

Mathieu was an exemplary student of medicine and surgery, a native of Sucre like other residents in the
pensión,
who suffered from sinister premonitions. Less than a week before he had announced that the most imminent and terrible one, because of its devastating consequences, might be the assassination of
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. But this did not impress anyone because you did not need premonitions to suppose that would happen.

I almost did not have the heart to race across the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and arrive breathless at the café El Gato Negro, almost at the corner of Carrera Séptima. They had just taken the wounded man, still alive but without hope of surviving, to the Clínica Central, some
four blocks away. A group of men were dipping their handkerchiefs into the pool of warm blood to keep as historical relics. A woman in a black shawl and
espadrilles, one of the many who sold trinkets in the area, held a bloody handkerchief and growled:

“Sons of bitches, they went and killed him.”

Bands of bootblacks armed with their wooden boxes tried to knock down the metal gates of the Granada
drug store, where the few police on duty had locked away the attacker to protect him from the angry mob. A tall man, very much in control of himself and wearing an irreproachable gray suit as if he were going to a wedding, urged them on with well-calculated shouts that were so effective the owner of the pharmacy had raised the metal gates for fear they would burn the store. The attacker, clutching
a police officer, succumbed to panic at the sight of the maddened crowds rushing toward him.

“Officer,” he pleaded, almost without a voice, “don’t let them kill me.”

I will never be able to forget him. He had disheveled hair, a two-day beard, a dead man’s gray color, and eyes that bulged with terror. He had a very worn brown suit with vertical stripes, its lapels ripped by the first tugs of
the mob. It was an instantaneous and eternal apparition, because the bootblacks tore him away from the police with blows of their boxes and then kicked him to death. The first time he went down he had lost a shoe.

“To the Palacio!” shouted the man in gray, who has never been identified. “To the Palacio!”

The most hotheaded obeyed. They seized the bloody corpse by the ankles and dragged it along
Carrera Séptima toward Plaza de Bolívar past the last electric streetcars stopped by the news, shouting warlike insults against the government. From sidewalks and balconies they were urged on with shouts and applause, while the corpse disfigured by blows was leaving shreds of his clothing and his body on the paving stones. Many joined the march, which in less than six blocks had reached the size
and expansive power of an outbreak of war. All that was left on the macerated corpse were undershorts and a shoe.

The Plaza de Bolívar, which had just been refurbished, did not have the majesty of other historic Fridays, with its graceless trees and the rudimentary statues of the new official esthetic.
At the Capitolio Nacional, where the Pan-American Conference had opened ten days earlier, the
delegates had left for lunch. And so the mob continued on to the Palacio Presidencial, which had also been abandoned. There they left what remained of the corpse, clothed only in the shreds of his undershorts, his left shoe, and two inexplicable ties knotted around his neck. Minutes later the president of the Republic, Mariano Ospina Pérez, and his wife arrived for lunch after having opened a cattle
fair in the town of Engativá. Until that moment they had not known about the assassination because the radio in the presidential automobile had been turned off.

I remained at the scene of the crime for ten more minutes, surprised by the speed with which the accounts of witnesses were changing in form and substance until they lost all resemblance to reality. We were at the intersection of Avenida
Jiménez and Carrera Séptima, at the time of day it was most crowded, and fifty steps from
El Tiempo.
By then we knew that those accompanying Gaitán when he left his office were Pedro Eliseo Cruz, Alejandro Vallejo, Jorge Padilla, and Plinio Mendoza Neira, minister of war in the recent government of Alfonso López Pumarejo. It was he who had invited them all to lunch. Gaitán had left the building
where he had his office without bodyguards of any kind, surrounded by a compact group of friends. As soon as they reached the sidewalk, Mendoza took his arm, led him a step ahead of the others, and said:

“What I wanted to tell you is something really stupid.”

He could not say more. Gaitán covered his face with his arm and Mendoza heard the first shot before he saw, standing in front of them,
the man who with the coldness of a professional aimed the revolver and shot three bullets into the head of the leader. An instant later there was already talk of a fourth shot that missed, and perhaps a fifth.

Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who had come with his father and his sisters, Elvira and Rosa Inés, saw Gaitán sprawled faceup on the sidewalk a minute before he was taken to the hospital. “He
didn’t seem dead,” he told me years later. “He was like an imposing statue lying on the sidewalk beside a meager bloodstain and with a great sadness in his open, staring eyes.” In the
confusion of the moment his sisters thought their father had been killed too, and they were so dazed that Plinio Apuleyo took them onto the first streetcar that passed to get them away from the scene. But the conductor
had full knowledge of what had happened, and he threw his cap to the floor and left the trolley in the middle of the street in order to join in the first shouts of the rebellion. Minutes later it was the first streetcar overturned by the crazed mob.

The discrepancies regarding the number and role of the protagonists were unresolvable because one witness declared there had been three who took
turns firing, and another said that the real shooter had slipped into the unruly crowd and without haste had climbed onto a moving streetcar. What Mendoza Neira wanted to ask Gaitán when he took his arm was none of the many things that have been speculated on since then, only that he authorize the creation of an institute to educate union leaders. Or, as his father-in-law had joked a few days earlier:
“A school to teach philosophy to the chauffeur.” Before he could mention it the first shot had been fired in front of them.

Fifty years later, my memory is still fixed on the image of the man who seemed to incite the crowd outside the pharmacy, and I have not found him in any of the countless testimonies I have read about that day. I had seen him up close, with his expensive suit, his alabaster
skin, and a millimetric control of his actions. He attracted my attention so much that I kept an eye on him until he was picked up by too new a car as soon as the assassin’s corpse was dragged away, and from then on he seemed to be erased from historical memory. Even mine, until many years later, in my days as a reporter, when it occurred to me that the man had managed to have a false assassin
killed in order to protect the identity of the real one.

The Cuban student leader Fidel Castro was in that uncontrollable tumult, twenty years old and a delegate from the University of Havana to the student congress convened as a democratic replica of the Pan-American Conference. He had arrived some six days earlier, in the company of Alfredo Guevara, Enrique Ovares, and Rafael del Pino—Cuban
university students like him—and one of his first acts was to request an
appointment with Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whom he admired. Two days later Castro saw Gaitán, who scheduled an appointment with him for the following Friday. Gaitán himself made a note of the meeting in his desk diary, on the page corresponding to April 9: “Fidel Castro, 2pm.”

According to what he has recounted in various media
and on different occasions, and in the endless accounts we have made together in the course of a long friendship, Fidel first heard of the crime while walking around the area so that he would be on time for his two o’clock appointment. All of a sudden he was surprised by the first crowds running wild and the general shout:

“They killed Gaitán!”

Fidel Castro did not realize until later that the
meeting could not in any way take place before four or five o’clock, because of Mendoza Neira’s unexpected invitation to Gaitán to have lunch.

There was no room for anyone else at the crime scene. Traffic had stopped and streetcars were overturned, and so I headed for the
pensión
to finish lunch, when my teacher, Carlos H. Pareja, blocked my way at the door to his office and asked me where I
was going.

“I’m going to eat lunch,” I said.

“Don’t fuck around,” he said in his unrepentant Caribbean slang. “How can you think about eating lunch when they just killed Gaitán?”

Without giving me time to do anything else, he ordered me to go to the university and put myself at the head of the student protest. The strange thing was that contrary to my nature, I paid attention to him. I continued
north along Carrera Séptima, in the opposite direction from the mob that was curious, grief-stricken, and enraged as it rushed toward the crime corner. Buses from the Universidad Nacional, driven by angry students, were at the head of the march. In the Parque Santander, a hundred meters from the crime corner, employees were hurrying to close the entrances to the Hotel Granada—the most luxurious
in the city—where some ministers and notable guests of the Pan-American Conference were staying at the time.