Eduardo Santos y las sinsalidas de la república liberal
Isidro Vanegas Useche*
Universidad
Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia[1]
Resumen
La vida pública de
Eduardo Santos sirve de marco al estudio de algunas disyuntivas que enfrentó la
República Liberal. Santos intervino decisivamente en la escena pública para
plasmar un tipo de liberalismo reformista pero cauto en su manera de concebir
la dinámica de las transformaciones. Temía que un liberalismo demasiado
voluntarista realizara los cambios necesarios pero a costa de la estabilidad de
la república y del retorno de la violencia, que había podido ser mantenida bajo
control durante la república conservadora. Su itinerario público ayuda a
comprender esta etapa de la historia colombiana, más allá de las
responsabilidades ineludibles de ciertos actores políticos.
Palabras
clave:
República Liberal, Violencia, Conservatismo, Partidos
Eduardo Santos and the dead ends of the Liberal
Republic
Abstract
The public life of Eduardo Santos serves as the
framework for the study of some of the dilemmas faced by the Liberal Republic.
Santos acted decisively in the public scene in order to outline a reformist type
of liberalism, and at the same time, cautiously in his conception of the
dynamics of the transformations. He feared that an excessively voluntarist
liberalism would carry out some necessary changes, but at the expense of the stability
of the republic and a return to violence, which had been kept under control
during the conservative republic. His public itinerary helps to understand this
age of Colombian history, beyond the unavoidable responsibilities of some
political actors.
Key words: Liberal republic,
violence, conservatism, political parties.
Eduardo Santos et les
impasses de la République Libérale
Résumé
La vie publique
d’Eduardo Santos encadre l’étude de quelques dilemmes auxquels a dû faire face
la République Libérale colombienne. Santos est intervenu de manière décisive
dans la scène publique pour concrétiser un type de libéralisme réformiste mais
aussi prudent dans sa manière de concevoir la dynamique des transformations. Il
craignait qu’un libéralisme trop volontariste effectuerai les changements
nécessaires mais au prix de la instabilité de la république et du retour de la
violence, qui avait pu être maintenue sous contrôle pendant la république
conservatrice. Son itinéraire public peut nous aider à mieux comprendre cette
étape de l’histoire colombienne, au-delà des responsabilités de certains
acteurs politiques.
Mots clés: République Libérale -
Violence - Conservatisme – Partis politiques
1.
Introduction
The electoral triumph of Enrique Olaya Herrera in 1930,
can be, only a posteriori, and then narrowly,
considered a radical turn in national history. But historians have tended to
see that event, and the Liberal Republic in general, as a fortunate necessity,
with which they have artificially reduced the tensions and dilemmas faced by
political parties and the nation as a whole. Conservatives, however, could proclaim
themselves the organizers of a fruitful effort during the preceding three
decades, and could legitimately aspire to regain primacy in the republic.
This article seeks to understand, through following the
public life of one of the main liberal leaders, Eduardo Santos, to understand
some of the main issues that his party had to face during the period of the Liberal
Republic. We do this by looking mainly to answer the question of whether
liberalism practiced a "sectarian interpretation of history" during
these years, which would also have contributed to instability. The expression,
formulated by Santos himself in 1930, when Olaya had not yet taken possession
of the presidency, sought to warn his coparticipants against the temptation to
divide Colombian history into a luminous period of liberal dominance and a grim
period of conservative hegemony. Santos urged them to think of national history
as a "living organism" born in the New Granada Revolution and in
whose itinerary, follies or triumphs were resolved with the successes or
problems of the present, and were to be charged to the account of both parties.[2]
2. Strengthening liberalism without crushing the republic?
Eduardo Santos was fundamental both in the
materialization of the presidential candidacy of Enrique Olaya Herrera and in
his triumph. Once this was produced, he expressed confidence that the new
government would overcome party disputes while remaining a liberal
administration, although not in the sense that it should subordinate itself to
that party or lash out at its rivals, but in the sense of working for liberal
ideals[3]. In this attitude of Santos was an important dilemma
for many liberal leaders, who for years had cultivated a sober but energetic
militancy that had contributed much to making the republic liveable. How to
affirm liberalism, leave the liberties of the republic alive, and at the same
time carry out a long-term program, could have been the concerns of many of the
liberal leaders who matured in the bitter experience of the separation of
Panama and the last civil war; experiences which had tended to emit violence
from the political arena. [4] The resolution of this problem, however, did not lie only with the
liberals.
From the early moments of the Olaya government, the
liberal leaders strove to work closely with the president, for they feared-and
Santos shared that uneasiness-that Olaya would repeat what Carlos E. Restrepo
had done during his government (1910-1914), when, for the commendable
neutrality of the executive power he had allowed the conservatives to keep
intact the levers of their predominance in the state, particularly the
electoral authority and the justice apparatus, with which they had continued to
control the vote and in that way hegemonized the republic. Santos asked the
president for greater influence in government for liberalism, not through an
arbitrary redistribution of seats but through the recognition that electoral
power and the administration of justice should also reflect the electoral
preferences of citizens. He emphasized that Olaya's triumph challenged
liberalism to materialize that which it had demanded in the last decades, for
although the republic had reached a level of wisdom that buried the romanticism
of ideologies and weapons, that was not a reason for liberals to relax. On the
contrary, a victory such as that achieved should encourage them instead to
obtain "a chain of victories", to undertake "an eternal march forward[5]," an expression which
manifested the liberal certainty that history belonged to them.
Santos, who in the previous two decades had made
repeated gestures of disdain towards parties and political mechanics, now
demanded for his party, a preponderant role in government; thinking that in
order to advance liberal ideals it was important that the men in charge of
directing the state belonged to one or another political current. He accepted,
therefore, Olaya's offer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had been
there from the very beginning of his administration, conscious of being a party
man in a cabinet where the conservatives, liberals, and republicans of which it
was composed were not men very involved in partisan dynamics. As he anticipated,
he spent four months as chancellor, without advancing any significant project:
he received many recommendations, gave out some positions in consulates and had
Congress approve some minor international treaties[6]. He considered that both in the press and the party his work was more
important for the consolidation of the victory of liberalism, which during
almost all of the government of Olaya, seemed somewhat fragile to both the
conservatives and the liberals themselves.
Santos then proceeded to denounce the conservative party
tactic, which sought, he said, to weaken the government and pave its way back
to power through a consistent tactic of provoking incidents and aggravating
even smaller conflicts in order to justify before the national executive its
demand to remove the authorities affiliated with liberalism. The conservatives
tried not to allow their positions be taken away, while the liberals, led by
Alfonso López, organized an intense campaign to advance on the key positions of
their adversaries, not only in Congress and other legislative bodies but
throughout the governmental apparatus. Santos, from his personal closeness with
the president, urged him to prevent the conservatives from continuing to use
electoral power to advance fraud, he said, and to give liberals the feeling
they were backed, that they were the government and that their rights would not
continue to be circumvented. He asked the executive to make the liberals feel
that "their enemies" did not continue to hold power. He argued that
if liberalism declined electorally because of fraud, that would not only
alienate the government from solid support but also give strength to the less
civil sectors of the party. Santos, and the liberal leaders in general, pressed
Olaya on all sides to abandon his attitude, which they considered to be more
one of displeasure than neutrality, in the face of the supposedly arbitrary
management of electoral power by the conservatives. They also called for a
drastic change in the electoral legislation, which they described as distorted,
since it allowed conservatives in some departments to have more seats in
departmental assemblies than their rivals, even though they collected fewer
votes. Santos, like most of his co-partisans, was convinced that "the
republic wants to be liberal and it will be[7]" Liberalism, he believed, was the fate of the Colombian nation.
This conviction, which gave enormous vitality to
liberalism, ran counter to a similar certainty among the conservatives: that of
being the true majority, that a liberal republic would injure its interests,
its morality and its rights, undoing the more or less ideal republic that they
believe they had cemented from the Constitution of 1886. Under these conditions,
the campaign for public calm undertaken by several liberal newspapers was not
enough to prevent 1931 from being one of the years of the greatest political
violence in several decades[8]. Indeed, in the February elections for deputies to the departmental
assemblies, particularly in Santander, Boyacá and Bolivar, there were very
serious acts of violence in which the conservatives saw casualties only among
their co-partisans, and perpetrators only among the liberals. Eduardo Santos,
on the other hand, explained the particular breadth and cruelty of the violence
in Santander by the aggressive campaign of certain leaders, like the
conservative Manuel Serrano Blanco, who from his newspaper El Deber had knocked down the authorities and cried for blood[9]. He exhorted the cessation of this violence and even accepted for a
very short time the governorship of Santander, while the elections of
representatives to the House were taking place. Santos believed that the
persistence of violence was not alien to certain long-established identities,
so that in his inaugural address, on May 2, 1931, he invited the Santander
people to deny the image that a picturesque and deceptive literature had
constructed of them as inhabitants of a land possessed by fierce hatreds,
"where human life has little value and tolerance and the cordial
collaboration of the parties are exotic plants." An image that, he added,
some politicians unfortunately cultivated when denouncing civic virtues such as
concord, as if they were "scarce ideological weaknesses of manly
resolution." Turning sectarian intransigence into a distinctive feature of
the Santander people, which they should be proud of, he told them, was to sink
into barbarism when what they needed was to affirm the benefits of each
political group through the brilliance of ideas and the strength of the
realizations that they could push forward. This conception, which he had
disseminated from his earliest years in republicanism, assumed that overly marked
partisan adhesions would be bloody madness[10].
For that moment, what defined the public life of
Eduardo Santos was not journalism, so he continued to protect his newspaper, El Tiempo. Because from the beginning of
the National Concentration campaign his relationship with journalism had been
transformed completely in several ways. In the first place, he practically
abandoned the personal management of the newspaper, both during his long periods
abroad and for his immersion in strictly political combat. Secondly, he was
treated by his newspaper as what he came to be, one of the most important
politicians in the country, whose activities were devoted not only the modest
spheres that had been the norm until then, but also to large spaces. Thirdly,
contrary to what he himself said, and perhaps he thought, El Tiempo became his direct political platform[11]. The leadership of his newspaper was tightly linked to its credibility,
beyond partisan boundaries, and Santos was concerned that El Tiempo strongly supported the Olaya government, although without
being unconditional or pugnacious with its critics, as it would have been
reduced to an official body of diminished prestige[12]. In the middle of 1931 Santos even moved abroad - which had been done
shortly before by other liberal leaders like Alfonso López and Gabriel Turbay
-, with which President Olaya was notified that liberalism recognized his
government as liberal and gave him the whole field to manage the party[13]. In Paris, Eduardo Santos would devote himself to diplomatic efforts,
first as a representative of Colombia in the League of Nations, and later as a
special delegate following the conflict with Peru[14].
Santos's trip to Europe was possible at this time
because he, like the liberals in general, had acquired the certainty, which is
particularly notable when the presidential period was halfway through, that
liberalism had a large majority in the country. They believed themselves to be
predominant in all the large population centers with some industrial development,
and assumed that electoral defeat could only originate from conservative fraud,
which would inevitably lead to a large-scale violent clash. Santos considered
the conservative party only as a "strong minority who have not lost hope
of regaining what it lost," and who harbor the illusion of reestablishing
a regime from which they would completely exclude their rivals. A party that
had lost "the illusion of its majority" and for this reason would not
be able to remain in power except through violence[15]. There is nothing to suggest that these assessments were well founded,
and in retrospect they are alarming because Santos represented the least
intransigent sector of liberalism.
But intransigence was the very early the tone of a
transition which in conservatism also became an internal transition. The old conservative
leaders raised in the Regeneration were replaced by leaders, young people in
general, who had long waited to be able to enjoy pre-eminence in the party[16]. By mid-1932 Laureano Gómez had already managed to unite conservatism
behind him, despite the fact that some of his co-partisans were resistant to
his leadership. Gomez deployed a strategy of denying any legitimacy to the
liberal regime while exacerbating the animosities of his co-partisans. These were
called to repudiate any institution, any measure, any act of the government or
the liberal party, considering them a
priori as injurious to the nation and the republic, and at odds with any
moral principle. It seems as if the conservative leader frantically sought to
have forgotten what had been his usual attitude during the conservative
republic: to be close to republicans and liberals and to affirm republican
values[17], because Laureano Gómez then began to hammer against
the liberal enemy the charges of attempting against peace and doing everything
with dishonesty and incompetence. From the elections of May 1933, he said, and
would continue to say the same thing almost without interruption, that the electoral
defeat of his party did not contradict the fact that conservatism has an
"indisputable numeric majority", which is only blurred by "a
chain of crimes "by the liberals. He also began to argue that it was not
possible to expect justice from its opponents, and that conservatives should
seek it in their own way, thus suggesting that the recourse to violence could
be used by his co-partisans[18].
This exacerbated political environment had barely been
moderated by the conflict with Peru, which ended in May 1933, following the
assassination of the dictator Sánchez Cerro. Santos's intervention in the
League of Nations was considered successful by liberals and some conservatives,
insofar as it had reaffirmed Colombian rights in the Amazon while opening up
possibilities for a peaceful settlement. This balance was contested by several
political leaders for whom Colombia had acted in a pusillanimous manner, not
only failing to resolve the conflict in the field that Peru had presented, the
military aggression, but making inadmissible concessions in the diplomatic field,
such as the celebration of an international conference in Rio de Janeiro, where
the treaty that had established boundaries between the two countries could have
been revised[19]. One of the most ardent critics of the Colombian government's handling
of this conflict was Laureano Gómez. The crisis with Peru, which served his
absolute disqualification of the government well, encouraged him for a long time
to promote discussions in the press and the Senate, where in September 1933 he
had a debate on the work of Santos in the League of the nations. But Gomez
seemed less interested in demonstrating the mismanagement of the government
than in eroding the position of liberalism and placing himself as the ruler of
the political scene. To discredit his antagonists, he did not mind adulterating
the facts, adopting the arguments of the Peruvians, and vexing the country he
supposedly defended[20].
Upon his return to the country, at the end of July 1934, Santos sought to refute those accusations also from the House of Representatives, where he had obtained a position while he remained abroad, in an example of the notable rank he had reached within liberalism. The director of El Tiempo sought not only to dismiss Gomez's criticism but also to elucidate the reasons for his accusations, which he saw as a tactic to draw closer to the newly elected President Alfonso Lopez and to try to distance him from liberalism and, on the other hand, as an expression of his morality and character. The conservative leader, Santos said, finds a "fund of perversity" in all acts because he judges everything with that criterion. In addition, he is in principle opposed to conciliation and rejects everything, having opposed "all" the international pacts or treaties signed by Colombia[21]. In this controversy with Santos there appears an important aspect of the personality of the conservative leader, which perhaps helps to understand the nature of their hatred, and the hatred that it helped to spread through the public scene and the Colombian society. Laureano Gómez accused his adversary above all because he had changed his personal position regarding him, betraying some kind of friendship. In fact, he stressed that El Tiempo encouraged him for years to criticize the men in power when they were conservatives but now it was annoyed by his criticism of men in power when, according to him, in both cases he was only guided by an interest in serving the country. He asserted that El Tiempo threatened to take away the "personality" he had been given, if he attacked the politics that liberalism had been exercising, but that he had taken up the challenge and had also overcome: "It was believed that nothing could be done without the support of that newspaper and without flattering Eduardo Santos. Today I am worth more; they wanted to finish me and they did not manage it. And I have succeeded in separating the conservative opinion from EL TIEMPO, which had been largely subject to its tutelage. That was a big mistake. The mistakes of the last conservative administrations are due to the rulers who paid attention to what EL TIEMPO said and thought. And I have achieved that independence and that liberal opinion in a large part also became independent." The immense power that had allowed Santos to achieve the strange goal of taming conservatism while he had believed the governing force had been broken by the tenacity of the conservative leader who found nothing but honesty, civic virtue, and intelligence[22].
The conservative party became more and more like its
captain. Even a calm conservative such as Pedro J. Berrio from Antioquia ended
up joining the fanatical sectarianism of Laureano Gomez, and although he
admitted that the conservatives committed acts of violence, he saw them as something
isolated while the attacks of the liberals he judged to be a strategy guided
from above to strip them of the part of "homeland" to which they were
entitled. Their co-partisans, said Berrio, were facing "a regime of
violence that we cannot counteract with the only weapons we have, which are the
law and morality.[23]" The conservative chiefs reaffirmed their opposition to the
liberal republic by comparing the situation of public order when they had
prevailed with what was happening then, after the victory of liberalism. While
tolerance had supposedly reigned in the first stage, liberalism, in complicity
with the government, daily disturbed the tranquillity, having proposed to
exterminate the conservatives.
Like many other liberals, Alejandro López denied that
the liberals had the intention of crushing their adversaries and instead called
on conservatism to act with patriotism. At that time, he told them, peace
depended on them, as it had depended on the liberals between 1903 and 1930. At
that time, the liberals had managed to make peace by helping conservatism to
govern, allowing them to rule, that is, by admitting that their rivals legitimately
exercised authority and that a change of that situation could only come from
the ballot-paper, so that the defeated party had to intervene peacefully in
political struggles[24]. Alejandro López's analysis was, in effect, the attitude of the
opposition had been crucial in reaching the considerable detente that prevailed
in the first three decades of the twentieth century[25]. Among the liberals, there were now others who were able to accept
that, as the conservatives claimed, some of their co-partisans used violence to
confront their political rivals, but they stressed that the "energetics"
who committed crimes in deed and word were not just liberals but also
conservatives, hence it was incumbent on both parties to end these practices.
Some liberals became aware of the dangers of a tense political environment, but
unfortunately liberalism in general was convinced that every electoral victory
was the ratification of the inexorable and just advance of the "liberal
revolution," which was to disrupt the "machine of predominance" that
the conservatives had installed to exercise their power from their situation of
minority, and had to produce deep changes in all the orders of the life of the
republic. Liberals, paradoxically, recognized that the country had produced a
"civilization of political struggle," and believed that Colombians
could be proud of the difference that in this area had been made with respect
to the Europeans, of whom it could be said at this time were engaged in
irresponsible violence[26].
The liberals thought themselves obliged and authorized
to take the positions of the conservatives, but this they did feeding at times
the fears of their rivals with notable outrages, such as the one they committed
by adulterating the number of votes assigned to Alfonso López in the
presidential election of 1934. This was acknowledged and deplored by the
liberal journalist Enrique Santos, who alluded to the "fabulous electoral
result" according to which 900 thousand citizens had voted when some calculations
set the true number at 20 or 50% less. Caliban refused to admit that this could
have been a fraud, for even with one vote the liberal candidate would have
triumphed, but admitted that "genuine democracy does not admit these
demonstrations. It is not possible to pass them in silence or stimulate them,
because this situation becomes the norm and ultimately converts the republic
into a gambling den.[27]"
The liberalism of those years was not only concerned
with building an electoral majority but also devoted significant efforts to
transforming social bonds and trying to establish new political principles and
practices. Liberalism took the path to becoming a major party - an important
milestone of this impulse was the creation of the Liberal House in 1933, in
Bogotá - a party that did not want to reduce its scope of action to the
parliament or the government, and which emphasized its self-definition as a leftist
group, dedicated to seeking greater equality[28]. The leader of this orientation was undoubtedly Alfonso López, with
whom hardly another liberal could have disputed the succession to Olaya Herrera
in the presidency, and whose pretension decidedly supported Eduardo Santos as from
mid-1932. Santos understood that in that candidacy, the fate of the liberal
republic was at stake, so he dispensed with the "fundamental
antipathy" that distanced him from Lopez, whom he and Olaya Herrera
doubted were able to soberly lead liberalism amid the enormous challenges
facing the country[29]. Santos and Lopez represented two styles of leadership and two ways of
conceiving of political representation. López, since before assuming the presidency
had shown signs of socially divisive language, which was cunningly reproached by
the conservative Alvaro Holguin. In the governments of the Colombian republic,
he wrote, errors and even political crimes could be found, but Lopez's
assertion that all Colombian governments had been oligarchies was unfortunate
inasmuch as it tended to take away any legitimacy from the political regime.
Certainly, there had been party governments, Holguín said, but it was not
enough to say that an oligarchy was the one that had ruled, when the most
important positions had been occupied by men of diverse origins, although of
talent, preparation, and patriotism. Eduardo Santos shared the rejection of
those denouncers of oligarchies and the certainty that in the republic this
category was of a destructive character to the social bond[30]
In opposition to this caution, President López would
act driven by the maximalist conviction that in the entire history of the
Colombian republic the popular will had always been falsified, reforms had
always been frustrated and oligarchies had always dominated the masses[31]. Lopez carried out important reforms, many of which were long dreamed
of by the Liberals, but which - as an editorial El Tiempo on the changes in the electoral system suggested - had
lost much of their fruitfulness to the extent that they were not received on
the political scene as acts tending to remedy certain deficits of the country,
but instead were disqualified by a powerful adversary who saw them only as the
ruses of liberalism to exert an intolerable domination[32]. Under these conditions, the stability of the republic was confronted
with the difficulty that the liberals and conservatives each considered
themselves to be the majority. The solution was apparently easy: to create
institutions that would resolve this situation and give the command of the
republic to the party that collected the most support. The ambitious initiative
of identity card registration moved in that direction, as did other actions
taken by Lopez so that elections were transparent processes. The insurmountable
failure of this solution was that each party believed itself to be greater than
the other, not only numerically but also morally, and conservatism challenged
the fairness of the liberals a priori
in the electoral count, preventing them from measuring the support available to
them from among citizens. Each party was believed to be the only legitimate
holder of the state attribution of accounting for the divisions of the
republic: indeed, each considered that the other brought a destructive project
to the republic. The liberals were convinced that they were carrying out a
revolution and that it was a non-violent revolution. The conservatives believed
that their adversaries were actually advancing a revolution that, like any revolution,
involved a lot of violence: not only the physical type that emerged above all
in electoral disputes, but also symbolic violence derived from the dismantling
of an already consolidated order, which in their eyes was socially and morally
harmonious[33].
Eduardo Santos systematically supported the Lopez
administration for its achievements, and did not make strident objections to
its way of standing against the conservatives. The alarmed cries of these
because the president was delivering himself to communism, when he had
acclaimed a popular crowd, despised Santos as a ratification of his malignity
to the liberal republic, which only did justice to "those below"
giving them better opportunities for a decent life within a concept of social
harmony. And when the clergy and conservatism came to demonize the
constitutional reform, he replied that it was not a whim but rather just the
updating of the country to the changes of a very different order than had
occurred in recent decades[34]. That attitude solidified his already strong position in liberalism,
which in 1935 had made him part of its national leadership, had taken him to
the Senate and had appointed him president of this corporation[35]. But Santos was not chosen to succeed Lopez except when Olaya Herrera,
the unnamed rival and designated candidate, died in Rome in February 1937.
If it had been for his own words, however, that route
to the presidency would have been forbidden. In January 1935, he had publicly
stated his alleged incapacity for that office and his horror of "things of
power," as he lacked the gift of command and the "rudeness necessary
to assume power." He had, he said, characteristics inconvenient for the
presidential function, such as "affection for all people, the pity that
human misery causes me." "I have no tyrannical or domineering hands.
I am just a good man who wants to be right and whose most intimate pride will
be to perform acts that can be considered as beneficial for the country", he
added. This man who on several occasions had described himself as a lover of
anonymity and who had tried various explanations for his foreseeable failure as
president, showed with such insistence how much this role really tempted him, which
for someone with so much public recognition it could not fail to appear as a
destiny[36]. Despite this reticence, from which emerges such a
gloomy view of the presidential function and politics in general, as soon as
the candidate already designated by liberalism passed away, Eduardo Santos
accepted the nomination of his name to fill that void. Lopez’s supporters tried
without much enthusiasm to raise the option of Dario Echandía as a candidate,
but it was difficult in the circumstances of liberalism that someone other than
Santos assumed the liberal leadership in elections which conservatism again
refused to accept[37].
Before he campaigned, the victory of the liberal
candidate was assured, but that did not make the realization of a campaign unnecessary,
although he could succeed with a single vote, the legitimacy of his presidency,
and that of the liberal regime in general, would depend to a good measure that
he could show that a significant portion, in fact, a large majority of
citizens, had given him the triumph. The strength of the new government would
depend, moreover, on its ability to show that all liberalism followed him, so
that it must emphasize his character as the continuator of the work of the two
previous administrations. The candidate was officially proclaimed by the
assemblies of all the departments, gave lectures everywhere, mobilized
political intermediaries throughout the country and toured various regions[38]. This intense activity was not, however, to the liking of President
López, who, excusing himself in the rejection of the House of Representatives
to a project on devaluation, threatened to resign his position at the end of
May 1937. The liberal candidate tried to persuade him that the "situation
of interim, almost of inferiority" in which he and the santistas intended to place him, existed
only in his imagination, since he had no hurry to enter to govern immediately,
nor any animosity towards Lopez. Even El
Espectador, a newspaper that was very close to the president, reprimanded him
for having indicated that he would resign due to the invasion of his authority
on the part of the santistas[39]. Nevertheless, Eduardo Santos hastened his departure from Colombia,
once the National Liberal Convention, which met in July of that year, made him
an official candidate and gave him full powers to lead the party[40].
The liberal candidate returned to Colombia in March
1938 and took up, among other things, to make new political tours[41]. He was a candidate without ostensible enemies, as even Laureano Gomez
recognized his probity, "his republican spirit, his respect for public
liberties," his patriotism and modesty. Laureano found that the liberal
candidate lacked a project that credited him as a statesman, but in the name of
conservatism he said he had a margin of confidence because he had managed to
command the executive without politically mortgaging anyone and without carrying
the injuries resulting from an arduous campaign[42] . On May 1, 1938, this 50-year-old man was elected president of
Colombia.
Few Colombian presidents had reached this position
with such great power, as Santos could count on the support of the majority of
the ruling party, with the unconditional support of the leading national
newspaper and with the self-marginalization of the opposition party's electoral
combat. The conditions for his initiatives to be materialized were favorable
because many people felt that the country was orderly, in such a way that acts
of political violence that happened especially in the election periods did not
substantially alter that feeling. In his inaugural speech, the new president
alluded to all the major national issues, proposing to continue, with a gradual
approach, the changes initiated in the previous 8 years, but promising above
all to expand the possibilities of material well-being, to guarantee justice
and safeguard the peace[43]. This last promise was faced with a difficult challenge in January 1939
when several conservatives, taking part in a political meeting in the town of
Gachetá in Cundinamarca, were killed during a riot promoted by local liberals.
The government had taken preventive measures to avoid such acts, but as Enrique
Santos said, they were insufficient because the spirit of conciliation between
the political parties had been lacking. Eduardo Santos fought hard to bring
that spirit of conciliation to the whole nation, and his efforts found an echo,
so that during his term political violence was largely controlled. And this
despite the lack of enthusiasm for coexistence that continued to be manifested by
several political leaders, which Gilberto Alzate frankly admitted. "We
respect the moral courage of Eduardo Santos, by opting for the thermidor and
trying to demobilize the party passions that would bring him to power. But we
know too well the interim nature of this artificial truce," wrote the
right-wing leader[44].
Santos used the presidential
role in moderation, striving not to transcend the mandates of the law, and made
a fruitful administrative effort[45]. His management, however, was not rewarded with the enthusiasm of the
liberals, among other reasons because Santos was characterized, rather than for
fostering hopes, for meeting them modestly. Alfonso Lopez succeeded him, who
from the time Santos had taken over the government had been convinced that he
was working to ruin his administration. That is why López had urged Alberto
Lleras, from his newspaper, El Liberal,
to face up to the ungrateful Santos, who, having made his choice as a continuer
of the policies developed between 1934 and 1938, once in power had abandoned
them for others, thus supposedly, rejected liberalism. The dissatisfaction between
the two was old, although they had fought some decisive battles for liberalism
together, like the candidacy of Olaya Herrera, triumphant in 1930. Lopez was
not forgetting the late incorporation of Santos into liberalism nor the doubts
that he continued to maintain with respect to the party. "He has always
felt closer to the conservatives than I, politically and personally," he
wrote to Luis Cano. He saw in Santos someone who had not ceased to be a soldier
in the extinguished Republican party, someone in whom the years did not manage
to erase "the tendency to outlaw the party spirit, because it is harmful,
and imagine that it is a great work when it is condemned", believing that
they, the Republicans, are the only ones able to put the country's interest above
the interests of the party. According to them, López added, the parties cannot
make any contribution to national progress, theirs being, then, an
"apolitical concept of politics, conceitedly superior." But it would
not be a simple difference of style- calm and balanced in one, restless and
combative in the other - but a fundamental difference, López said: to make the
reforms that his government made, belligerence was essential. The pause of
Santos did not require belligerence, said the former president, while it did
require "reforms, change, evolution, and revolution, even if peaceful[46].
Alfonso Lopez was right when he alluded to the
mistrust that Santos had until very late with respect to the Liberal Party and
its leaders. "I do not have great confidence in our party, nor in its men,
but it is a fact that it constitutes a strong majority. [...] What I do not know
is whether the liberals will be able to secure their victory, and to develop a
policy that does not alienate the national will. There is so much foolish and
mischievous there that one loses all hope and even all charity, "he had
written to President Olaya Herrera. And he doubted that after this, the leader that
was indicated to continue the reforming work of liberalism was Lopez, being
someone prone to "popular shouting" and not one convinced of the
"quiet and gradual liberalization of the country. [47]" In 1941 Santos gave a journalist a phrase with which he alluded
vehemently to the leopards, to Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, and to other politicians
of that moment, but he also could have been thinking of Lopez: "For
democracy to fulfil its function it must be more than what it is today, to
leave aside the politicking and the peroration, which prevent and disturb rapid
and fruitful action. What offends me the most in the world is the frantic and
theatrical oratory.[48]" Luis López de Mesa, like many other observers of the time,
coincided with Santos in the characterization of the type of leadership of
Lopez Pumarejo, whom he contrasted with Olaya Herrera saying that while this
was a man of calm, the first was a "man of the ideal message", with
whose political leadership the Colombian people "do not feel calm"
because "not a single moment has managed to be the center of repose of
Colombian sensitivity." And this despite the fact that Lopez led the
nation in line with the political mutations that the world experienced, and
that he did so with a pragmatic sense[49].
The liberal Abelardo Forero Benavides, for his part,
would describe the leadership of Santos, in contrast to that of López, not like
that of a warlord, because "it does not affect the emotional background of
the Colombian masses, nor has it provoked rabid explosions", but rather as
a leadership of "intellectual order, benign and extended, calming and
quiet.[50]" In the 1940s then, the liberalisms of Lopez and
of Santos were in contradiction, but due not so much to the doctrinal content
as to the way of conceiving of political representation. It is not a tension
that comes from a socioeconomic fracture within the leadership, that is, the
moderate sector is not simply its "oligarchy", while the leaders who
present themselves as radicals are not the humble. Nor did this tension
originate in some representing the people and others representing the upper
classes, nor that some wanted reforms and the others did not. This division had
more to do with the way in which each thought it appropriate to carry out the
reforms, for while some sought to encourage citizens to take the public space
to give them an impulse, others considered that this was unnecessary and would
compromise social peace, a goal as important as the reforms themselves.
In the 1940s, in any case, the liberals were being
taken by the certainty that theirs was an insanely fragmented party. After the
first two years of Lopez's second administration, the wasting of liberalism was
something that could not be hidden, bursting with all its force the proposal of
the 1946 presidential race. The open hostility between currents and party
leaders was compounded by the erratic intervention of the chief liberal,
Alfonso Lopez, who made liberalism the disconcerting proposal of forming a
"national front" with the conservatives, a formula that could find a
way of materializing in the delivery to the conservative board of the power to
choose the presidential candidate from among three liberals. The proposal found
no sympathy among the conservatives, and most of the liberals considered it
simply a way of sabotaging the official candidacy of liberalism. José Joaquín
Castro, for example, wrote to Eduardo Santos saying that in that proposal he only
saw "personalism, rancour, rivalries and ambitions," and that it
demonstrated the grave ills that afflicted liberalism[51]. Enrique Santos observed that among the liberals there was an agreement
on the need for a policy that would overcome disastrous sectarianism, but that
while Lopez proposed the dissolution of the two parties into a kind of single
party, the liberals were already responding to that unease within the
presidency of Alberto Lleras, who was striving to achieve national consensus
but without aiming for the elimination of the parties, which he did not
consider possible or convenient[52].
The conclusive proof of liberal decline was the
enormous electoral force that Jorge Eliécer Gaitán acquired in a short time in
the name of a political project that rejected fundamental elements of
liberalism that had been laboriously cultivated in the previous 30 or 40 years.
Gaitan was another who thought that the party regime had been exhausted, but overcoming
that scheme was not conceived through some kind of party cooperation, but
through the destruction of parties and the incarnation of the people in a
leader. Eduardo Santos, who had wanted to withdraw from political activity but
had to assume important responsibilities as the president of the national liberal
leadership, strongly contradicted that gaitanista
project of the "moral restoration" of the republic. Gaitanismo, he said, implies a challenge
to the work of liberalism and of what liberalism is, its rhetoric of the
oligarchy lacking any basis, which nevertheless generated antipathy to liberalism
among the people and became an effective instrument to arouse the class
struggle. Gaitan, he added, had made his political career using an unrestricted
freedom of speech, the same that his troops denied those considered to be their
enemies, stoning liberal newspapers or preventing other liberals from
delivering speeches[53]. Baldomero Sanín Cano was sharper and associated gaitanismo with Nazism and fascism. "Men who gather around a
candidate under the motto of 'moral restoration' are not liberals in the
traditional and etymological sense of the word, because they invoke force and
violence as a procedure and teach of victory. Nothing is more contrary to the secular
thesis of the party than these forms of emulation and propaganda," he wrote
when the candidate of the "real country" was developing his
presidential campaign[54].
In 1946, the liberal candidate had been defeated, and two
years later the violence, which he had been trying to restrain with such
arduous efforts, was unleashed. The country was on the road to a systematic reduction
of liberties, an obscene delight in barbarism, a destruction of the liberal
institutions and traditions, which Eduardo Santos - like all the liberal
leaders - witnessed like an impotent spectator. He tried in vain to make
efforts to make the situation of his co-partisans less difficult and the
violence less disastrous. He thought that the main responsibility for
everything lay with the conservatives, and among them in certain spirits of
particular insanity, but in a letter, he admitted bitterly that the liberals
too had much to be forgiven[55].
Santos did not specify those "sins," but the
historian may well ask about the ways in which liberals may have contributed to
the violence. Perhaps they had an overconfidence that the violence had been
definitively removed from the republic, which prevented them from working hard
enough to block the factors that at one point could allow its return on a
magnitude capable of disrupting order. In spite of the great advances that they
made to purify the electoral procedures, they did not proscribe completely the
fraud among their ranks. All this makes it possible to postulate that the
liberals continued to maintain a sectarian interpretation of history, the
synthesis of which can be seen in an article by Jorge Zalamea in which
conservatism is defined as a "satanic desire for power.[56]" At times, in the heat of political combat, even Eduardo Santos
forgot his own call not to divide Colombian history into a hemisphere of light
and another of darkness, according to the position held by the party from which
was spoken[57]. On many occasions, moreover, the liberals tended to confuse the fate
of the republic with the fate of liberalism: they reasoned that when nothing
threatened liberal domination, no threat loomed over the republic. It could be
said that the phrase attributed to Eduardo Santos, "democracy cannot be
but liberal[58]", sometimes interpreted in the sense that the command of it was
reserved exclusively for the liberal party and not in the sense that it was
impossible to deny its liberal foundation or be emptied of that liberal foundation.
And, finally, the liberals did not have the capacity to prevent the development
of a current that conceived of the party as an army ready for a social rather
than political struggle, a current in which violence was not repudiated in
absolute philosophical terms: Gaitanism.
Sources
Archives
Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Academia Colombiana
de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60.
Archivo José Joaquín Castro
Martínez, Universidad Externado, sección 2, carpetas 1-2.
Biblioteca
Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo Alberto Lleras, carpeta 4.
Press
El Siglo, abril 30 de
1938, Bogotá
El Tiempo, años de 1930 a 1946, Bogotá
La Patria,
enero 17 de 1939, Manizales
Sábado, años de 1943 a 1946, Bogotá
Vida, año de 1941,
Bogotá
Bibliography
Guerrero,
Javier.Los años del olvido. Boyacá y los
orígenes de la violencia, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo / Universidad Nacional,
1991.
Henderson, James.La modernización en Colombia, Medellín:
Universidad de Antioquia, 2006.
Holguín, Álvaro. “Oligarquía y
democracia (Carta política al doctor Alfonso López)”, Revista Colombiana, vol. III, nº 27, (mayo 1 de 1934): 65-70.
Lleras Camargo, Alberto.Obras
selectas de Alberto Lleras, t. II, Bogotá: Biblioteca de la Presidencia de
la República, 1987.
Lleras de la Fuente, Carlos.Cartas del exilio, Bogotá: Planeta, 2005.
Rodríguez,
Gustavo Humberto.Olaya Herrera, 2ª
ed., Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1981.
Santos, Eduardo y otros.La política liberal en 1937, Bogotá: Talleres Gráficos Mundo al
Día, 1937.
Vanegas,
Isidro.Todas son iguales. Estudios sobre
la democracia en Colombia,
Bogotá: Universidad Externado, 2010.
To cite this article:
Isidro Vanegas Useche, “Eduardo Santos and the dead
ends of the Liberal Republic”, Historia y Memoria, No. 11 (July
- December, 2015): 241-270.
* Doctor of History, Universite París I. Master’s degree
in Contemporary History. Professor of the
School of Social Sciences and Coordinator of the Doctorate in History,
Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. Email address: isivanegas@yahoo.com
[1] This article is part of the research project República y democracia en la historia de
América Latina (Republic and democracy in the history of Latin America), of
the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia.
[2]Eduardo Santos, “Contra la interpretación sectaria
de la historia”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
March 8, 1930, p. 3.
[3]Eduardo Santos, “¿Cómo será la administración Olaya
Herrera?”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
February 25, 1930, p. 3.
[4] A detailed analysis
of the matter is in, Isidro Vanegas, “Un tiempo que impugna la fatalidad
retrospectiva de la violencia”, in Todas
son iguales. Estudios sobre la democracia en Colombia, (Bogotá: Universidad Externado, 2010), 269-337.
[5] Eduardo Santos, “El fin de una administración”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 7, 1930, p. 4;
“Carta del doctor Eduardo Santos a la Junta Asesora”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 9 1930, p. 15.
[6] His ministerial management must have seemed of such
little importance that he did not even offer a balance of it in his newspaper. See “El doctor
Eduardo Santos y el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August
8, 1930, p. 1; “El Dr. Eduardo Santos se retira del ministerio de RR. EE.”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, December 7, 1930, p. 1. On his activities in the chancellery, see
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Fondo Academia
Colombiana de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60, carpeta
1, ff. 1-36.
[7]
“Carta del doctor Eduardo Santos sobre su actitud en la Cámara y
sobre la ofensiva conservadora contra las autoridades”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
December 14 1930, p. 1; Carta de Eduardo Santos al
Presidente Olaya, January 9 1931, in AGN, Fondo Academia Colombiana de
Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60, carpeta 1, ff. 37-42; Eduardo Santos, “Sin
novedad en el frente”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 10 1931, p. 4; Eduardo Santos,
“Colombia liberal”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 2 1931, p. 4.
[8] One of the few studies of the dynamic of the violence
of those years is the book by Javier Guerrero, Los años del olvido. Boyacá
y los orígenes de la violencia, (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, Universidad
Nacional, 1991).
[9]“Cosas del día. Las víctimas de la violencia”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 2 1931, p. 5; Eduardo Santos, “La paz, los escrutinios y
la circular presidencial”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 5 1931 p. 4.
[10] On his
administration as governor, and his successes in reducing violence, at least
temporarily, see: “Hoy se resolverá la
situación en Santander del S.”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, May 1 1931, p. 1;
“Se posesionó el Dr. Santos de la Gobernación de Santander”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 3 1931, pages 1, 12; “Se ha acentuado la división
conservadora en Santander”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 7 1931, p. 6; “Del Presidente al
Gobernador de Santander S.”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 17 1931, p. 1.
[11] In this period, the newspaper consolidated its
position as the first Colombian newspaper, not only in terms of influence but
also of circulation, in the midst of a serious crisis of the conservative
press. In January of 1932 it indicated that its daily circulation was of 30
thousand copies, of which more than half were distributed outside Bogota, being
read the same day of its release in the majority of the important cities thanks
to its air shipment. “EL TIEMPO en
1931 y 1932”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 1 1932, p. 4; Alberto Lleras Camargo, Obras selectas de Alberto
Lleras, t. II, (Bogotá:
Biblioteca de la Presidencia de la República, 1987),
19-22, 137-138.
[12] Letter from Eduardo Santos to his brother Enrique
and to Alberto Lleras, París, January 22, 1932, in Biblioteca Luis Ángel
Arango, Archivo Alberto Lleras, carpeta 4, ff. 25/1-25/3. The importance of El
Tiempo, Bogotá, for the
government was possibly to warn it in the explicit request that Olaya Herrera
made to Santos that he orient his newspaper towards a unanimous defence of his
orders (Letter from President Olaya Herrera to Eduardo Santos, May 27 1932, in
AGN, Fondo Academia Colombiana de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección
7ª, caja 60, carpeta 1, ff. 63-64).
[13] “Cosas del día. El
viaje del director de EL TIEMPO”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, June 5 1931, p.
4; “Eduardo Santos elogió nuestro espíritu civil”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, June
28 1932, p. 1.
[14] Letters from Eduardo Santos to President Olaya, October 15 1931 and
January 19 1933, in AGN, Fondo Academia Colombiana de Historia, Colección
Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60, carpeta 1, ff. 47-49, 78r; “Eduardo Santos es
delegado especial de nuestro gobierno en Europa”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
November 25 1932, p. 1; “Raymond Poincaré da un concepto favorable a la tesis
colombiana”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, October 23 1932, p. 1.
[15]Letter from Eduardo Santos to President Olaya, April 20 1932, in AGN, Fondo
Academia Colombiana de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60,
carpeta 1, ff. 54-58.
[16]An important feature of the conservatism of the period
of the Liberal Republic is that its leadership was completely new, or should
appear as new. Many are aware of this generational change. See, for example,
“Historia natural del liberalismo”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, December 17 1933,
p. 4.
[17]On this period of Laureano Gómez, systematically
avoided by Colombian intellectuals, see James Henderson, La modernización en Colombia, (Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia,
2006), 68-275.
[18]“La justicia conservadora”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 21
1933, p. 4; “Un gobierno fuerte y el partido de gobierno”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
October 20 1933, p. 4. See also: “El manifiesto de abstención. El Directorio
explica las razones sobre la política de abstención”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April
18 1935, p. 16.
[19] On the
Colombian-Peruvian conflicto and the performance of Eduardo Santos, the
synthesis of Gustavo Humberto Rodríguez can be consulted in Olaya Herrera, 2ª ed., (Bogotá: Banco de
la República, 1981), 229-243.
[20] “Le tocó al doctor Santos el turno de ser agredido por Laureano Gómez en el Senado”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, September 14 1933, pages 1, 9; Luis Eduardo Nieto Caballero, “La vieja intemperancia”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, September 14 1933, p. 4; Rafael Guizado, “Los cargos del S. Gómez al Dr. Santos por sus actuaciones en Ginebra, vistos por un experto”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, September 15 1933, p. 4.
[21] “El doctor Santos
juzga inatacable el pacto de Río”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, July 27 1934,
pages 1, 16; “El doctor Santos hizo gran elogio del presidente Olaya”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, July 28 1934, pages 1, 15; “Eduardo Santos destruyó todos los
cargos de Laureano Gómez y demostró la corrección absoluta de su labor en
Ginebra”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 25 1935, pages 1, 2, 13;
Germán Arciniegas, “El regreso de la diatriba”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
January 25 1935, p. 4; “El doctor Santos defiende el Protocolo de Río y explica
las bases de la política internacional”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, January 26 1935,
p. 15.
[22]“El discurso del senador Laureano Gómez”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 26 1935, p. 15.
[23]“Berrío contesta a Luis Cano. El jefe conservador de
Antioquia analiza las causas de la abstención”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April
18 1935, pages 1, 9.
[24] “La doble circular”,
El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 21 1932, p. 4; “La
pesadilla conservadora”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 13 1935, p. 4.
[25] Isidro Vanegas, “Un
tiempo que impugna la fatalidad…”, 308-311.
[26] Luis Eduardo Nieto
Caballero, “Anhelos de justicia”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, September 25
1934, p. 4; “La victoria de ayer”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, February 6 1933,
p. 4; “La civilización de la lucha política”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, March
5 1932, p. 4; “Un año electoral”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, January 2 1935,
p. 4; Armando Solano, “Abstención electoral”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 9 1935, p. 4.
[27]Enrique Santos, “La danza de las horas”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 13 1934, p. 4; Enrique Santos, “Una victoria empañada”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 12 1934, p. 4.
[28] “El momento de la
Dirección Liberal”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, November 28 1933, p. 4; “Un balance
contradictorio”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 8 1935, p. 4.
[29]Letters exchanged between Alberto Lleras and Enrique
Santos, September 1934, in Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo Alberto
Lleras, carpeta 4, ff. 27/1-27/3; Letter from Eduardo
Santos to Olaya Herrera, April 20 1932, in AGN, Fondo Academia Colombiana de
Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60, carpeta 1, f. 57.
[30]Álvaro Holguín, “Oligarquía y democracia (Carta
política al doctor Alfonso López)”, Revista
Colombiana, vol. III, nº 27, (May 1 1934): 65-70; “Eduardo Santos destruyó
todos los cargos de Laureano Gómez y demostró la corrección absoluta de su
labor en Ginebra”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 25 1935, p. 2.
[31]Alfonso López Pumarejo, “La
república liberal es incompatible con la burla de la voluntad popular”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 13 1934, p. 1.
[32]“Un año electoral”, El Tiempo editorial, Bogotá, January 2 1935, p. 4.
[33] “El régimen liberal no puede ser una hegemonía
estilo regenerador”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 17 1935, pages 1, 2; “El
gobierno y la oposición. Nunca ha existido el propósito de colocar al
adversario en situación de inferioridad respecto de la ley”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 27 1935, pages 1, 14; “Serenidad y locura”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 27 1935, p. 4.
[34] Eduardo Santos, “El
gobierno liberal”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 3 1936, p. 4; “El alcance de la
reforma constitucional”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 6 1936, p. 4.
[35]“Qué condiciones deben llenar los candidatos para la
próxima cámara”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 9 1935, p. 1; “Los 7 senadores por
Cundinamarca fueron elegidos ayer tarde”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, June 8 1935,
pages 1, 14.
[36]Letter from Eduardo Santos to President Olaya, April 20 1932, in AGN, Fondo
Academia Colombiana de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya, sección 7ª, caja 60,
carpeta 1, f. 58r; “Eduardo Santos destruyó
todos los cargos de Laureano Gómez y demostró la corrección absoluta de su
labor en Ginebra”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 25, 1935, p. 2.
[37]Eduardo Santos et al, La política
liberal en 1937, (Bogotá:
Talleres Gráficos Mundo al Día, 1937).
[38]“Discurso del doctor Eduardo Santos”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, February 21,
1937, p. 4; “Germán Arciniegas, director de ‘El Tiempo’”, El Tiempo, Bogotá,
February 27, 1937, pages 1, 20; Eduardo Santos et al, La política liberal en 1937…; “El viaje de Eduardo Santos. Entrevista con
Nieto Caballero”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 3, 4, 1937, pages 4, 15; “Las 14
asambleas proclamaron la candidatura presidencial del doctor Eduardo Santos”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 4, 1937, p. 4.
[39]“Renuncia el presidente López”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, May 25, 1937, p. 1; “Observaciones del Dr. Eduardo Santos al
discurso pronunciado por el señor ministro de gobierno”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 26,
1937, p. 4; “Una deplorable interpretación”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 27, 1937, p. 4.
[40]“La Convención Nacional Liberal proclamó ayer
candidato presidencial al Dr. Eduardo Santos y le otorgó plenos poderes para
dirigir el partido”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, July 23 1937, p. 1; “El Dr. Santos y
su señora salen con rumbo a Europa hoy a la una de la tarde”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 12 1937, p. 1; Letter from Eduardo Santos to his brother
Enrique, October 16 1937, in Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo Alberto
Lleras, carpeta 4, f. 31/1.
[41]“Se trabaja con éxito en la manifestación al
candidato”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, March 16 1938, pages 1, 15;
“Espléndido recibimiento hizo Tolima liberal al candidato presidencial”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 18 1938, pages 1, 15; “Chiquinquirá recibió triunfalmente
al candidato único del liberalismo”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, April 22 1938,
pages 1, 13.
[42] Slyly, Laureano literally transposed what Santos had
said of Miguel Abadía Mendez when he was to be elected president, in which
position he was so disastrous. See “La jornada de mañana”, El
Siglo, Bogotá, April 30, 1938, p. 4; Eduardo Santos, “La jornada de hoy”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 14, 1926, p. 1.
[43]“La posesión del doctor Santos. Discurso del doctor
Eduardo Santos”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 8, 1938, pages 4, 7, 11, 18.
[44]“5 muertos y 7 heridos en la manifestación de Gachetá”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 9, 1939, pages 1, 2; Enrique Santos, “Danza de las
horas”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 10, 1939, p. 4; Germán Arciniegas, “Gachetá es
la excepción”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, January 11 1939, p. 4; Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, “La revolución está a la derecha”, La Patria, Manizales, January 17, 1939,
pages 1-3.
[45] He signed the coffee quotas pact, created the Industrial Development Institute and the municipal development fund in order to rationalize the state's investment in local public works, developed a housing program for workers, and another, unprecedented, for farm laborers. In addition, he put into operation the labor conciliation and arbitration commissions, consolidated the labor offices responsible for ensuring the recognition of workers' social benefits, promoted collective bargaining agreements and the issuance of labor regulations in companies, led the adoption of maternity protection laws and of compensation for some holidays. He also promoted the administrative career that sought to guarantee the employment stability of public employees as well as laws that benefited various railway workers, which made a part of the salary immune from being seized, which extended the terms for making salary claims, which legally perfected the individual work contract, which regulated the phases of negotiation of labor disputes. See: “Cuatro años al servicio de la patria”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 7 1942, p. 4; “El país vivió en un sólido ambiente de paz social durante la administración del presidente Santos”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 7, 1942, sección 2ª, p. 5; Jorge Bejarano, “La administración Santos y la higiene”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, August 7, 1942, sección 2ª, p. 2.
[46] Letters from
Alfonso López to Alberto Lleras, November 13, 1939 and May 13 and June 18,
1940, in Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo Alberto Lleras, carpeta 4, ff.
33/1-33/2, 35/1-35/6, 37/1-37/6; Letter from Alfonso López to Luis Cano, July 1,
1940, in Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo Alberto Lleras, carpeta 4, ff.
38/1-38/4.
[47]Letters from Eduardo Santos to President Olaya, April 20 and November 22,
1932, in AGN, Fondo Academia Colombiana de Historia, Colección Enrique Olaya,
sección 7ª, caja 60, carpeta 1, ff. 56v, 73r.
[48]Luis Enrique Osorio, “Eduardo Santos me dijo”, Vida, Bogotá: vol. 5, nº 41, December 1941, p. 23.
[49]Luis López de Mesa, “El caudillo de las
democracias”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 27 1937, p. 4.
[50]Abelardo Forero Benavides, “Eduardo Santos”, Sábado, nº 23, (December 18, 1943): 1,
22, 23.
[51] Alejandro Vallejo, “El día en que Turbay…”, Sábado, nº 134, (February 2 1946): 3,
14; “Formidable oración política pronunció el doctor Turbay”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 17 de 1946, pages 1, 8; “Frente nacional contra la
coalición y contra la reacción conservadora inician las directivas
antioqueñas”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, February 17 1946, p. 8; Letter from
José Joaquín Castro to Eduardo Santos, March 14 1946, in Archivo José Joaquín
Castro Martínez (AJJCM), Universidad
Externado, sección 2, carpeta 1, ff. 55-57.
[52]Enrique Santos, “Danza de las horas”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 5 1946, p. 4.
[53] “Concluida la
organización para la grandiosa manifestación que se hará el sábado al Dr.
Santos”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, July 19, 1944, pages 1, 13; “Con el
Partido Liberal”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 9, 1946, p. 4; “Texto de la conferencia del doctor Eduardo Santos
sobre la candidatura liberal”, El Tiempo,
Bogotá, April 28, 1946, p. 4.
[54]Baldomero Sanín Cano, “Cómo nace la antidemocracia”,
El Tiempo, Bogotá, April 29, 1946, p. 4.
[55] Letter from Eduardo Santos to
José Joaquín Castro, Paris, July 3 1953, in AJJCM, Universidad Externado,
sección 2, carpeta 2, f. 24r. An approach to this stage of the life of Santos can be made through the letters that he
exchanged with Carlos Lleras Restrepo. See Carlos Lleras de la Fuente, ed., Cartas
del exilio, (Bogotá: Planeta, 2005).
[56] Jorge Zalamea, “La
cultura conservadora y la cultura del liberalismo”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 8,
1936, p. 4.
[57]Eduardo Santos, “Contra la interpretación sectaria
de la historia”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, March 8, 1930, p. 3; Eduardo Santos,
“El señor Borda y el estudio de la historia”, El Tiempo, Bogotá, March 10, 1913, p. 2.
[58]“El ministro de gobierno
planteó claramente la política oficial”, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, August 22, 1936,
p. 13.