From the solution to a dictatorship to the end of bipartisanship
Despite having been a coup, the arrival of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power in 1953 was initially viewed with great optimism. The Conservatives, except the Laureanists, and the Liberals saw in the military dictatorship an opportunity to get out of the violence that had been exacerbated during the mandate of Laureano Gómez. Such was the optimism for the rise of the military to power that it was even said that the action to take over the presidency was a "coup of opinion", an expression coined by Darío Echandía, an important liberal leader of the first part of the 20th century, as justification for the action in which Gómez was deposed.
This was not the only attempt to legitimize the military mandate. Members of both parties participated in a Constituent Assembly, whose call came from the Gómez government, to appoint Rojas as president for four years (1954-1958). In this case, no democratic election was part of the consolidation of this body, but it still served to make reforms such as granting the vote to women, a measure that made one think that the dictator contemplated his mandate as a transitional one. However, once established in power, “the honeymoon did not last long”, as David Bushnell explains in his book “Colombia, a nation despite itself”. There was censorship of the press, violence was reactivated, the Liberals were again relegated from power and authoritarian actions were increasing. In addition, the military made clear his desire to remain in power for a longer time.
Although the "Christian and Bolivarian State" proposed by Rojas Pinilla had several supporters, especially from the popular classes in which the discourse against the "oligarchy" permeated, the traditional political class, represented in the elites of the two parties ( Conservative and Liberal), overcame initial optimism and came together with the aim of regaining power in the country. Negotiations began in Spain, where Laureano Gómez was in exile. There, he and Alberto Lleras Camargo established the steps for the democratic transition, agreements that were recorded in the Benidorm Pact. In this text, as Javier Duque points out in his article on the National Front, the priorities were established: "the return to the lost democratic institutional forms, the search for formulas to overcome violence, respect for freedoms and the joint action of parties through a succession of coalition governments.
Later this agreement deepened with the March Pact, signed in 1957, and which was accompanied by a climate of political instability in Colombia against the regime, this included a general strike and student protests, which ended with the resignation of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla on May 10, 1957. A few months later the Sitges Pact was signed, in which the basic principles of the National Front were enshrined: alternation of the parties in the Presidency, the equal distribution between liberals and conservatives of the Executive -distribution 50- 50 of the seats in the legislative bodies - and the equal distribution of positions in justice. All this was endorsed by the Colombians in the plebiscite held in December 1957.
The most important election of the second half of the 20th century was not presidential, but its objective was to recover the democratic order suspended by Rojas Pinilla. The historian Álvaro Tirado Mejía highlighted this process because it was “a definitive period in the history of Colombia. It was a novel choice. It was the first time that the plebiscite was used and in which women participated as voters.” With an extremely high turnout for the time, more than four million Colombians gave their endorsement for the creation of the National Front. The next call to the polls was in May 1958, in which the bipartisan agreement was confirmed with the election of the liberal Alberto Lleras Camargo. This obtained almost 80% of the votes, while a conservative dissidence, led by Jorge Leyva Urdaneta, obtained 19.7%.
The National Front elections, which were initially projected for 12 years but were later extended to 16, had no major incidents. Lleras Camargo was succeeded by Guillermo León Valencia. He went on to be remembered in history for trying to stop the peasant guerrillas inherited from the period of La Violencia with bombing. One of these actions, the bombing of Marquetalia, gave rise to the founding of the FARC in 1965. Years before, the communist influence, increased by the Cuban Revolution, and the closed bipartisan system created by the National Front was the breeding ground for the origin of guerrillas like the Eln and the Farc themselves. But the armed actions of Valencia, influenced by US anticommunism, ended up consolidating these insurgent movements.
The conservative Valencia was succeeded by Carlos Lleras Restrepo, who was recognized for his attempt to boost the country and get it out of its economic lethargy. This also reactivated the reformist drive of Alberto Lleras and led an agrarian reform, which included the creation of ANUC (National Association of Peasant Users of Colombia) and a new drive for land redistribution through INCORA. In addition, he was one of those who folded and took advantage of the Alliance for Progress in the United States to obtain resources and invest them in the modernization of the country, which had overcome a long delay due to violence in rural areas. However, in this government the National Front was at risk, all thanks to Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, an old acquaintance.
The former dictator was back in the country since 1958. He was immediately tried by Congress and stripped of his political rights. However, in a foreign body, he put several chips in Congress by being one of the founders of the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO) in 1962. However, the movement gained more strength when in October 1967 the Supreme Court of Justice returned political rights to the former general. This created an unexpected challenge for the National Front. In 1970, the last fair under the system agreed in 1957, Rojas Pinilla stood for election to face Misael Pastrana (official conservatism candidate) and dissidents Evaristo Sourdís and Belisario Betancur. The distribution of conservative votes and the great popularity of the former dictator led to a tight election in which even today there is talk of fraud.
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The election of April 19, 1970 once again aroused the interest of a people who, given the equitable distribution of power between the parties, stopped going to the polls. Participation in said day doubled the accounts of the other elections of the National Front and popular support for Gustavo Rojas Pinilla became evident in the streets. This was also perceived in the first reports from the Registry, broadcast on radio and television. But, at 10 p.m., the Minister of Government Carlos Arturo Noriega suspended the radio reports and centralized them in the official reports. From then on, the trend was reversed and the candidate Misael Pastrana became the leader.
For supporters of Rojas Pinilla and others, the Executive's decision served to cover up electoral fraud. On the other hand, for the conservative candidate, it was all a misunderstanding due to the delay in rural votes, as former president Andrés Pastrana, son of Misael Pastrana, commented to this newspaper for previous articles: “At that time, the country was divided between the rural and the urban, and conservatism was always rural. For this reason, there was the phrase that the party won on Mondays, when the votes from the province arrived.” The tension was felt in the following days, and a new Bogotazo was feared, but in the end Pastrana was the last official president of the National Front.
Beyond serving as an excuse for the founding of the M-19, the April 19 elections had no major repercussions. Misael Pastrana had complete freedom in his government and this was evidenced by the fact that he undid a large part of the advances made by Carlos Lleras in agrarian reform with the Chicoral Pact. Although the National Front officially ended in said government, its effects were felt until 1986, the beginning of the government of Virgilio Barco. The mandates of Alfonso López Michelsen (Liberal), Julio César Turbay (Liberal) and Belisario Betancur (Conservative) continued along the path of bipartisan cabinets and bureaucratic distribution. The following governments to 1974 showed that liberalism was the predominant political force in the country.
López Michelsen came to power in 1974 after returning to the ranks of the red rag party after being in a good part of the National Front in dissidence with his MRL (Liberal Revolutionary Movement). Although his mandate painted to be reformist, like his father, Alfonso López Pumarejo, he conformed to the forms that had been developing during 16 years of alternation. In 1978 Julio César Turbay Ayala came to power, recognized as one of the great regional electoral bosses of liberalism and who prevailed over an attempt by Carlos Lleras Restrepo to be re-elected. The questions about the Turbay Security Statute and the divisions in liberalism before the candidacy of Luis Carlos Galán and Alfonso López Michelsen made conservatism return to power with Belisario Betancur.
Despite his Laureanist extraction, Betancur stood out for his conciliatory presidency and because in his administration he had to face the first steps of drug violence, the Taking of the Palace of Justice and natural disasters such as the Armero avalanche. Liberalism was only out of power for four years, since Virgilio Barco prevailed in the 1986 elections. His mandate tried to break with a good part of the front-nationalist forms and recovered the opposition-party government. He also tried to carry out a constitutional reform whose failure was the final impetus for the convening of a Constituent Assembly that gave rise to the 1991 Constitution. His government will also be remembered because drug-trafficking and paramilitary violence killed four presidential candidates, including Luis Carlos Galan.
In the Barco government, two important elections were held for the creation of a new Constitution. In the first place, the 1990 legislative elections were the space for Colombians with the Seventh Ballot to express themselves in favor of a new Magna Carta. Later, in the presidential elections of that same year, in which the liberal César Gaviria was elected, the constituent call was officially confirmed. Already in December 1990, with Gaviria as president, the country returned to the polls to choose its representatives in the constitutional effort of 1991. This made the government of César Gaviria be identified with the constituent process.
In addition to this, said administration went down in the annals of history as the one that led the economic opening and the implementation of neoliberalism in the country. César Gaviria was followed in 1994 by the also liberal Ernesto Samper. However, he has already suffered from the natural wear and tear of his party in power for several years and had to go to the second round with the conservative Andrés Pastrana. This process would not have been strange at all if it were not for the fact that a week after the second call to the polls, the possible entry of money from drug trafficking into Samper's campaign, better known as Process 8,000, became known. This implied political and governability instability that was felt during the four years of his mandate and even almost led the Liberal president to resign.
This greatly discredited the Liberal Party, but it was not enough for Andrés Pastrana to come to power in the first round in 1998. Horacio Serpa, Samper's former minister, won the May elections, but the result was not enough for him to reach the House of Nariño. In a second round, Andrés Pastrana unbalanced the balance with the FARC's announcements that they would negotiate a peace agreement. The four years of the Dauphin's mandates were marked by the extensive and failed Caguán process. At the close of the Colombian 20th century, the violence of this guerrilla and paramilitarism was felt. This climate, in which Colombia figured as a failed state worldwide, was the fertile ground for bipartisanship to be buried in the 22 years of the 21st century and the political environment to be dominated by one name: Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
