My OperaTO EVERYONE: HAPPY BOGOTAZO!
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 5:25:15 PM
Image: A comic strip from the fifties depicting a funny right-wing version of the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the chaos that followed, where all was a comunist plot designed carefully in Moscow. Stolen from the image collection of Juglar del Zipa, a Colombian blogger.
I knew that there was something, besides the deadline to pay the rent, to be remembered about today. Sixty years ago, a charismatic Colombian candidate to the presidency was murdered in very strange circumstances, and the reaction that followed changed the face of Bogotá, the Colombian main city, and even of the country, forever.
I am not going to bore you to death with my political interpretation of this riot, but play a little with the idea of the generalised riot itself. (for that, the best thing would be to have a look at the web)
The so-called BOGOTAZO was not so much the murder of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, an extremely popular (and a little populist) politician, but the large-scale riot that took over the whole main city and part of the country, imposing in a temporal state of extreme violence and disorder. Of course, it has been the subject for a lot of arguing amongst Colombian bloggers, but I leave that to other sites the discussion, because others are less lazy than me to discuss blogging issues.
This BOGOTAZO affair makes me think, instead, in two things:
1 - What is it, that makes people behave so different when something really outstanding happens, when they stop worrying about the law, the moral, and let themselves go in a boundless riot? What would myself do in such a riot? I am thinking, of course, of something that is a lot more common in the so-called third world, where the civil order is allways frail. Usually people that is otherwise normal, tranquil people become very violent, and those who would never think of stealing can be seen breaking a glass in a shop and taking a TV away.
Sometimes I can think of what would be worth taking in such no-man's-land situation... but since I am not drunk with the feeling of revolution, or whatever it is, I can only think of stealing from big corporations, abstract entities that are also supposed to disappear in such circumstances. I would not want to steal things from a small shop whose owner I know, but perhaps TESCO is another business.
2 - How come these riots end up reinforcing the statu quo? In the case of Colombia, the bogotazo took the political conflict to another level, ensuring a long lasting and horrendous period of violence (it is known, generically, as the violence: la violencia) that had a bad ending: the two major political parties decided to abolish democracy for a while, and take turns in the government, in a hideous invention called the national front. In that way, every four years a new government tried to erase everything the previous one has done, even though they were not very different in ideology: liberals only moderate right (with few exceptions) and conservatives extreme right. Other parties were of course heavily harassed. From that period we have the legacy of the guerrilla war that have not ended in almost half a century.
There was also a more local effect: there was a millionaire real estate move underlying the riot. A handful of businesmen, who had bought very cheap lands in not very fancy parts of the city, could turn them into expensive areas. How? making use of the convenient fact that a large part of former fancy areas were now too dangerous to live in.
The conclussion I get from all this, is that such violent riots, in spate of their anarchic and exiting appearance, are usually the prelude of authoritarian hell.
