COLOMBIA: The Wheel of Hate

Colombia’s three-year undeclared civil war reached a new pitch of ferocity. Heretofore, most of the fighting had been confined to the countryside, where Conservative troops and police fought pitched battles against “bandits,” i.e., Liberal guerrillas. Last week the capital city of Bogotá was torn with strife.

Following a funeral for five guerrilla-slain policemen, some 200 well-coached civilian “rioters” sacked and burned the headquarters of two Liberal newspapers, one of them El Tiempo (circ. 180,000), Latin America’s most distinguished newspaper since the destruction of Buenos Aires’ La Prensa. The attackers destroyed the newspaper’s advertising and circulation records, wrecked its oak-paneled editorial offices and gutted its pressroom.

Challenge Met. Founded 42 years ago by Eduardo Santos, El Tiempo was democracy’s most powerful voice during Colombia’s period of peaceful progress in the first half of the century. During World War II, having temporarily laid aside his editorial responsibilities to serve as Colombia’s President, El Tiempo’s Santos ranged his country at the side of the U.S. His newspaper, printing not only first-rate world news but daily dispatches from correspondents in scores of Colombian cities, became a national newspaper, read from the Caribbean coast to the borders of Ecuador. El Tiempo was Liberal, independent and peace-minded. As such, it was and is a mortal threat to Colombia’s little clique of ruling Conservative extremists, who hold power under a 33-month-old state of siege.

El Tiempo rose to last week’s challenge. After missing one day, the newspaper borrowed an idle plant and triumphantly put out an eight-page tabloid edition. Santos, now ill and living in Paris, cabled congratulations to his staff. Four days later, El Tiempo confounded everybody a second time by getting its own big presses running again. Government diehards slapped on a tough new censorship which could stop the newspaper from publishing. But for the moment, El Tiempo was selling more papers than ever before.

Asylum Sought. There was evidence that the great majority of Colombians were tired of extremist hatemongering. When the government newspaper El Siglo reported that 36 soldiers had been killed in a fight with “bandits” early last week, the moderate Conservative Diario de Colombia printed proof that the real toll was four dead and one missing, and scolded El Siglo for falsifying the news. Said Medellín’s Conservative El Colombiano:

“We are riding a wildly spinning wheel where today’s victims become tomorrow’s executioners and these, in turn, the future victims. Each victim feeds on the idea of retaliation, so that there will be enough hatred in Colombia for the next 150 years.”

At week’s end, perhaps the best indication of the tension in Bogotá was the fact that Liberal ex-President Alfonso López and Liberal Chieftain Carlos Lleras Restrepo, whose houses had been burned by the same mobs that sacked El Tiempo, took asylum in the Venezuelan embassy.