76 A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLOMBIA
Simultaneously, an anti-American student meeting was taking place in the city.
Given this context, Conservatives quickly blamed foreign communist agitators
for the unrest. Among the many foreign students in Bogotá was a group from
Cuba that visited Gaitán in his office several days before his assassination. One
of them even made an appointment to see Gaitán again — at the Gaitán
museum today, the Liberal leader's datebook is opened to April 9, 1948, and one
can see what he was planning to do after lunch that day: "3PM — Fidel Castro."
The young Fidel Castro was in Bogotá! There are some who still believe that the
Cuban revolutionary killed Gaitán, but by his own account, he was not much
more than a bystander — with other students, he was hustled out of the capital
by the Cuban ambassador on a flight a few days later. All evidence seems to
point to a mentally unstable individual, Juan Roa Sierra, as the sole perpetrator
of the murder, but since he was immediately lynched, the full story may never
be known. The CIA has often been blamed, but the young agency seemed to
have been caught off guard by events in Bogotá, and was several years away
from organizing coups in Iran and Guatemala. Nevertheless, the U.S.
government has never released all of its documents on the incident.
After the initial shock over the assassination and the riots wore off, La Violencia
resurfaced in the countryside (as an urban phenomenon, the conflict was limited
to the 9th of April). Nervous Conservatives feared that their Liberal neighbors
would rise up again, and Liberals were afraid of the increasingly repressive
Conservative government. In an atmosphere of murders, massacres, and
atrocities, the Liberals boycotted the next presidential election and the
Conservative candidate, the intransigent Laureano Gómez, won unopposed. By
this time, personal and economic motives had quickly crept into the partisan
conflict, as local party leaders and ordinary peasants saw opportunities to steal
crops and land by massacring members of the opposite party. Some Liberal self-
defense units came under the influence of communist ideology, including one
led by a peasant fighter named Pedro Antonio Marín (alias Manuel Marulanda,
alias "Tirofijo" — "Sureshot"). Marulanda remained a guerrilla for the remainder
of his life, leading the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (the