"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 Septima toward Plaza de Bolivar 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 Bolivar, 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 Perez, and his wife arrived for lunch after having opened a cattle fair in the town of Engativa. 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 Jimenez and Carrera Septima, at the time of day it was most crowded, and fifty steps from El Tiempo. By then we knew that those accompanying Gaitan 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 Lopez Pumarejo. It was he who had invited them all to lunch. Gaitan 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. Gaitan 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 Ines, saw Gaitan 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 Gaitan 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 Eliecer Gaitan, whom he admired. Two days later Castro saw Gaitan, who scheduled an appointment with him for the following Friday. Gaitan 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 Gaitan!"
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 Gaitan 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 pension 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 Gaitan?"
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 Septima, 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.
A new throng of poor people in an open attitude of combat surged forward from every corner. Many were armed with machetes they had just stolen in the first assaults on stores, and they seemed eager to use them. I did not have a clear perspective on the possible consequences of the assassination, and I was more interested in lunch than in the protest, and so I retraced my steps to the pension. I ran up the stairs, convinced that my politicized friends were ready for war. But no: the dining room was empty, and my brother and Jose Palencia--who shared the adjoining room--were singing with other friends in their bedroom.
"They killed Gaitan!" I shouted.
They signaled that they already knew, but everyone's state of mind was more recreational than funereal, and they did not interrupt the song. Then we sat down to eat lunch in the deserted dining room, convinced the matter would go no further, until someone turned up the volume of the radio so that we indifferent ones could hear. Carlos H. Pareja, honoring the way he had incited me an hour earlier, announced the formation of the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno composed of the most notable Li
berals on the left, among them the very well-known writer and politician Jorge Zalamea. Their first resolution was the establishment of the executive committee, the command of the National Police, and all the organisms for a revolutionary state. Then the other members of the junta spoke with rallying cries that grew more and more extravagant.
In the solemnity of the act, the first thing that occurred to me was what my father would think when he learned that his cousin, the hard-nosed Goth, was the principal leader of an extreme left-wing revolution. The landlady at the pension, considering the importance of the names connected to universities, was surprised that they were behaving not like professors but like rowdy students. It was enough to go past two stations on the dial to find a different country. On Radio Nacional, the pro-government Liberals were calling for calm, on other stations they were clamoring against Communists loyal to Moscow, while the highest leaders of official Liberalism defied the dangers of the warring streets as they tried to reach the Palacio Presidencial to negotiate a pledge of unity with the Conservative government.
We continued to be dazed by that demented confusion until one of the landlady's sons shouted that the house was on fire. In fact, a crack had opened in the rear masonry wall and thick black smoke was beginning to rarefy the air in the bedrooms. It came, no doubt, from the Departmental Office of the Interior adjacent to the pension, which had been set on fire by the rioters, but the wall seemed strong enough to keep standing. And so we raced down the stairs and confronted a city at war. The tumultuous attackers were throwing everything they could find in the offices of the Gobernacion out the windows. The smoke from the fires had darkened the air, and the clouded sky was a sinister blanket. Maddened hordes, armed with machetes and all kinds of tools stolen from the hardware stores, attacked and set fire to the businesses along Carrera Septima and the adjacent streets with the help of mutinous police officers. An instantaneous glance was enough for us to realize that the situation was out of control. My brother anticipated my thought with a shout:
"Shit, the typewriter!"
We ran to the pawnshop, which was still intact with its metal grates locked, but the typewriter was not where it had always been. We were not concerned, thinking that in the days that followed we could recover it, still not realizing that this colossal disaster would have no days that followed.
The military garrison in Bogota limited itself to protecting government centers and banks, and public order was left to no one's responsibility. After the first few hours many high-ranking officials of the police had entrenched themselves in the Quinta Division, and numerous patrolmen followed them with loads of weapons they had picked up on the streets. Several of them, wearing the red armband of the rebels, fired a rifle so close to us that it resonated in my chest. Since then I have been convinced that just the report of a rifle can kill.
When we returned to the pawnshop we saw the businesses along Carrera Octava, the richest in the city, laid to waste in minutes. The exquisite jewels, English woolens, and Bond Street hats that we students from the coast had admired in unreachable shopwindows were now within reach of everyone under the gaze of impassive soldiers guarding foreign banks. The very refined Cafe San Marino, which we never could enter, was open and dismantled, for once without the waiters in tuxedos hurrying to stop Caribbean students from going in.
Some of those who came out loaded down with fine clothing and great bolts of woolen cloth on their shoulders left them abandoned in the middle of the street. I picked one up, not thinking it would weigh so much, and much to my sorrow I had to leave it behind. Wherever we went we stumbled across household appliances thrown into the street, and it was not easy to walk through the bottles of expensive brands of whiskey and all kinds of exotic drinks that the mobs beheaded with blows of their machetes. My brother Luis Enrique and Jose Palencia found remnants of the looting in a good clothing store, including a sky-blue suit of very good wool in my father's exact size, which he wore for years on important occasions. My only providential trophy was the calfskin briefcase from the most expensive tearoom in the city, which allowed me to carry my originals under my arm on the many nights during the years that followed when I had no place to sleep.
I was with a group making its way along Carrera Octava toward the Capitolio, when machine-gun fire swept over the first ones to approach Plaza de Bolivar. The instantaneous dead and wounded piled up in the middle of the street stopped us cold. A dying man bathed in blood who dragged himself out of that promontory clutched at my trouser cuff and shouted a heartrending plea:
"Boy, for the love of God, don't let me die!"
I fled in terror. Since then I have learned to forget horrors, my own and other people's, but I never forgot the hopelessness of those eyes in the brilliant glow of the fires. Yet it still surprises me not to have thought, even for an instant, that my brother and I might die in that pitiless hell.
At three in the afternoon it began to rain in great gusts, but after five o'clock a biblical deluge put out many smaller fires and lessened the impetus of the uprising. The small Bogota garrison, incapable of confronting it, managed to separate the fury in the streets into smaller groups. It was not reinforced until after midnight by emergency troops from neighboring departments, in particular Boyaca, infamous for being the school of official violence. Until then the radio incited but did not inform, so that no news report had a source and the truth was impossible to determine. In the small hours the replacement troops took control of the business center devastated by the mobs and with no light other than the fires, but politicized resistance still continued for several days, with snipers stationed in towers and on roofs. By then, the dead in the streets were uncountable.
When we returned to the pension most of the city's center was in flames, with overturned streetcars and ruined automobiles serving as improvised barricades. We put the few things worth saving in a suitcase, and only later did I realize that I left behind the first drafts of two or three unpublishable stories, my grandfather's dictionary, which I never recovered, and the book by Diogenes Laercio that I received as a prize in the first year of my baccalaureate.
The only thing my brother and I could think of was to ask for shelter in Uncle Juanito's house, only four blocks from the pension. It was a second-floor apartment with a living room, dining room, and two bedrooms, and my uncle lived there with his wife and children, Eduardo, Margarita, and Nicolas, the oldest, who had been in the pension with me for a while. We almost did not fit, but the Marquez Caballeros had the good heart to improvise spaces where there were none, even in the dining room, and not only for us but for other friends and companions of ours from the pension: Jose Palencia, Domingo Manuel Vega, Carmelo Martinez--all of them from Sucre--and others whom we did not know.
A little before midnight, when it stopped raining, we went up to the roof to see the infernal landscape of the city illuminated by the embers of the fires. In the background the hills of Monserrate and La Guadalupe were two immense masses of shadow against the sky darkened by smoke, but the only thing I kept seeing in the desolate fog was the enormous face of the dying man who dragged himself toward me to beg for impossible help. The hunt in the streets had subsided, and in the awful silence you could hear only the scattered shooting by countless snipers posted all around the center, and the clamor of troops who little by little were exterminating all traces of armed or unarmed resistance in order to control the city. Overwhelmed by the landscape of death, Uncle Juanito expressed in a single sigh the feelings of all of us:
"My God, it's like a dream!"
Back in the semidarkness of the living room I collapsed onto the sofa. The official bulletins from the radio stations occupied by the government depicted a panorama of gradual tranquility. There were no more speeches, but you could not distinguish with precision between the official stations and those still controlled by the rebellion, and even these were impossible to differentiate from the uncontrollable avalanche of ill-intentioned rumors. It was said that all the embassies were overfl
owing with refugees, and that General Marshall was staying in the embassy of the United States, protected by an honor guard from the military school. Laureano Gomez had also taken refuge there in the first few hours and had held telephone conversations with his president, trying to stop him from negotiating with the Liberals in a situation that he considered directed by the Communists. The former president Alberto Lleras, who was then secretary general of the Pan-American Union, had saved his life by a miracle when he was recognized in his unarmored car as he was leaving the Capitolio, and the mob had tried to make him pay for the legal transfer of power to the Conservatives. By midnight most of the delegates to the Pan-American Conference were safe.
Among so many contradictory news reports, it was announced that Guillermo Leon Valencia, the son of the poet of the same name, had been stoned to death and his body hanged in the Plaza de Bolivar. But the idea that the government was controlling the situation began to take shape as soon as the army recovered the radio stations that were in the hands of the rebels. Instead of proclamations of war, the news reports attempted to calm the country with the consoling thought that the government was master of the situation, while high-ranking Liberals were negotiating with the president of the Republic for half the power.
In reality, the only ones who seemed to act with any political sense were the Communists, a minority of zealots, who could be seen in the midst of the disorder in the streets directing the crowd--like traffic police--toward the centers of power. Liberalism, on the other hand, showed itself to be divided into the two halves denounced by Gaitan in his campaign: the leaders who tried to negotiate a portion of power in the Palacio Presidencial, and their voters who resisted however they could and as far as they could from towers and roofs.
The first doubt that arose in connection with the death of Gaitan concerned the identity of his assassin. Even today there is no unanimous belief that it was Juan Roa Sierra, the solitary shooter who fired at him from the crowd on Carrera Septima. What is not easy to understand is that he would have acted alone, since he did not seem to have the kind of background of autonomy that would allow him to decide by himself on that devastating death, on that day, at that time, in that place, in that manner. His mother, Encarnacion Sierra, the Widow Roa, who was fifty-two years old, had learned on the radio about the assassination of Gaitan, her political hero, and was dyeing her best dress black in order to mourn him. She had not finished when she heard that the assassin was Juan Roa Sierra, the thirteenth of her fourteen children. None of them had gone past primary school, and four of them--two boys and two girls--had died.