Hostage Nation Read Online Free PDF

War claimed an estimated 250,000 lives, but it ultimately failed to overthrow the Conservatives. The Conservative party remained in power until 1930, when the Liberal party was able to convince a Colombian electorate, suffering from an economic depression, to elect Liberal candidate Alfonso López. The Liberals remained in power until the 1946 election of moderate Conservative Mariano Ospina.
    During Ospina’s term, conflict between the Liberals and Conservatives continued, resulting in increasing partisan hostility. Then in 1948, the assassination of Liberal party presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán brought about a tremendous surge in violence, which would cause 300,000 deaths throughout the 1950s, earning the decade the name La Violencia. Killings became more and more sinister and grotesque. Bodies—mostly those of Liberals—turned up all over the country, mutilated, burned, and decapitated. Peasants who considered themselves members of the Liberal party (mainly because they followed the party of their
patrones)
were targeted by death squads sponsored by the Conservatives. Liberal peasants and members of an emerging Communist movement counterattacked, forming gangs and self-defense units. All the while, the Liberal elite in Bogotá, mostly unaffected by the violence, turned a blind eye to the bloodshed.
    It was one of those rural Liberals, a young salesman in his late teens named Pedro Marín, who went into hiding in the hills of the Cordillera Central and emerged to become one of the most successful guerrilla leaders in history. Of that period, Marín later wrote, “The police and armed Conservatives would destroy the villages, kill inhabitants, burntheir houses, take people prisoner and disappear them, steal livestock and rape the women. The goal of the Conservative groups was to inflict terror on the population and take advantage of the goods the peasants had.” Rather than wait idly for his impending murder at the hands of Conservatives, Marín took the nom de guerre Manuel Marulanda (after a murdered union leader) and gathered the necessary tools to launch a guerrilla war. “The Liberals wanted to fight back,” he wrote. In addition, Marín brought together Communist party members, who were also targets of the Conservatives. “Men and women formed groups that had little stability, but as the residents in the pueblos began to hear about these groups, more people joined. Like many newly founded groups, they lacked experience and adequate organization. But they made their way to the spine of the Cordillera Central, and for those who had been essentially condemned to death by Conservatives, this became a place of salvation.”
    Marulanda had very little formal education, but he quickly became a skilled leader and an excellent guerrilla tactician—his proficiency as a marksman earned him the nickname “Tirofijo,” or “Sureshot.” In 1953, after a military coup ousted the Conservative president Laureano Gómez, Gen. Gustavo Rojas offered amnesty to Liberals who had taken up arms. After many who turned themselves in were murdered, Marulanda and the majority of his guerrilla troops vowed never to return to civilian life and to continue their fight against the entrenched and corrupt political establishment. La Violencia came to a close at the end of 1957, when the Liberals and Conservatives joined together in a power-sharing relationship they called the National Front.
    Unlike his charismatic contemporaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Marulanda gave no rousing speeches. He lived an almost hermetic lifestyle and remained mostly an enigma to the general Colombian population and to many in his ranks. Physically, he was unassuming—short, stocky, and unsmiling—and in his later years, he had a profound slouch and sagging features, which gave the appearance of a grumpy grandfather rather than the commanding leader of a vast guerrilla army.