A Threat of Daggers

Around the Caribbean, Latin Americans have a saying when senselessness creeps into affairs. "La banda esta borracha," they shrug--"The band is drunk." In mountain-ridged, coffee-growing Colombia, the band went on its binge from 1948 to 1958, when the nation's two ruling parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, fell into an ugly civil war that killed 200,000 Colombians. The country has been suffering from the hangover ever since.

Last week's congressional elections show how painful the headache is. In an effort to end la violencia, Liberals and Conservatives* agreed in 1958 to unite in a National Front, with the presidency alternating between parties every four years, and a two-thirds majority required for all laws. Things calmed down all right; but without any real opposition to the ruling coalition, apathy ensued. With only 40% of Colombia's 7,000,000 adults going to the polls, the front last week won 102 seats in the 190-man House of Representatives, and 60 in the 106-man Senate --short of the needed two-thirds in both cases.

Lost Contact. The real winner was former Strongman Gustavo Rojas Pi-nilla, 66, a general who came to power with the aid of the military in 1953 as their unsuccessful candidate to end the vendetta and was removed by the military in 1957, after having disgusted Colombia with censorship and pilfering of public funds. Last week, though ignored throughout the campaign by TV and press, and personally forbidden to run, Rojas had the satisfaction of seeing his ANAPO party win half a million votes, 18% of the total--making him the unofficial and highly embarrassing leader of the opposition.

Leaders of the front knew all too well what had happened. Said Carlos Lleras Restrepo, 57, the Liberals' candidate for President next May: "The traditional parties have lost contact with a certain sector of the population." He meant the thousands of excampesinos who squat in squalid shacks surrounding Bogota and Cartagena and have been growing restive under the lackluster rule of Conservative President Guillermo Leon Valencia. During the campaign, Rojas drew enthusiastic crowds with his vivid lectures on economics, in which he argued that the way to get the peso on a par with the dollar was to "lock up all Colombians with money outside the country and not let them go until they bring back the $3 billion they have hidden abroad." His daughter Maria Eugenia Rojas de Moreno Diaz, 30, who ran for the Senate, turned up in the smaller towns to buy rice, yucca and corn at the marketplace. Then she set up a booth to resell them at a half or a third of the price, telling everyone, "This is how much it will cost after we win."

Last week in Bogota, amid his large collection of china figurines, Rojas was busy interviewing possible figureheads to run against Lleras Restrepo in May. "We want no revenge," he announced. "Only a good man who thinks of the people." However, he went on to hint ominously that the "oligarchy" had stacked the ballot boxes against him, and "if the same thing happens again, not I, but the people will want to fight." For some time he has talked of "a dia lect of daggers"; and though a rightist, during the campaign he adopted as his personal martyr Camilo Torres, a 37-year-old priest who took to the hills as a Castroite guerrilla and was gunned down by an army patrol last month.

Lleras Restrepo, however, a trained economist, is not without resources. He hopes to combat the right-left crunch with a "bloodless revolution" of boosted tax collections and increased welfare spending, winning a two-thirds majority by swinging maverick opposition Liberals and Conservatives behind him. In one sense at least he has blood going for him. His distant cousin, Alberto Lleras Camargo, gave Colombia sane and prosperous government when he was the National Front's first President between 1958 and 1962.

* Labels that mean little. "I know Liberals who are the most reactionary people around," sighs a Conservative. "And several of the bright young Conservatives are far more radical than most Liberals."

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