Upheaval

Shortly before 1 p.m., a light rain swept across Bogota, wetting the columns of the Capitolio. There the ninth International Conference of American States had been in session for a fortnight on matters of high moment to the hemisphere--the industrial upbuilding of Latin America, the problem of Communism in the Americas. As the rain began to fall, most meetings adjourned for lunch.

Six blocks down the street, a short, muscular lawyer with piercing black eyes stepped briskly out of his office. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, rabble-rousing leader of Colombia's Liberal Party, was also luncheon-bound. As he crossed the sidewalk, a man with a pistol in his hand slipped up behind him, fired four shots into his neck and shoulders.

Like a man who had been bludgeoned, Gaitan fell, face down, and bloodstains widened on the sidewalk. A lottery vendor, standing in the doorway, dropped his book, grabbed the assassin and shouted: "This is the man." A cafe patron ran from another door, smashed a chair over the gunman's head.

A clotting crowd tore off his clothes, pounded him with shoeshine boxes snatched from ragged urchins, kicked his face and head into a bloody pulp. Then they knotted a tie around his neck and dragged him six blocks. All afternoon his body lay in the gutter before the Presidential Palace while the rain water made little whirlpools around his bare heels. Gaitan had been picked up and carried to the Clinica Central.

Two Flags. To Colombia's working classes, Gaitan had been an enshrined hero. For a month, they had burned with resentment because Conservative Party Leader Laureano Gomez had kept him from being a delegate to the International Conference. As Gaitan lay on the surgeon's table, his hysterical supporters stormed the Capitolio, screaming, "Death to Laureano Gomez!"

Thin-lipped Rightist Gomez, Foreign Minister, president of the conference and backbone of the government of gentle President Mariano Ospina Perez, was not there. But the rioters poured in anyhow. They threw typewriters out of windows, splintered furniture, tore up records.

In mid-afternoon the word spread: Gaitan was dead. The mob, which had quieted under the efficient handling of federal troops, went mad. Its members drove into the Cundinamarca building (provincial capitol), set fire to Gomez' Conservative newspaper El Siglo. They hurled stones through the windows of the President's palace. Across the city (pop. 400,000) smoke swirled from mob-struck buildings. Federal troops and police were powerless.

Bombs & Machetes. In the fire-blackened three days that followed, conference delegates escaped injury. The Mexicans walked out of the Capitolio in the first hour of the uprising, carrying their tricolor flag. Secretary of State George Marshall, at his suburban residence, was safe but marooned.

Most U.S. correspondents were in the Astor Hotel and they had a grandstand view of the fighting, in which 300 died. Cabled TIME Correspondent Tom Dozier: "Outside the hotel lie the bodies of two men and one woman who climbed atop one of the tanks that moved through the mob to defend the Presidential Palace. Government riflemen lying prone in the street popped them off at short range. One fell beneath the tank's treads and his head was crushed. It is not a pretty sight. . . .

"Bogota looks more like a blitzed city than one that has been through a near-revolution. Dozens of "buildings are burned, hundreds of stores wrecked and looted.

"When I walked from the hotel to the cable office, about eight blocks, I stumbled over bodies and debris. To escape soldiers' and snipers' bullets I crouched in doorways, flattened myself against walls, dashed across exposed street corners. The government has announced that calm reigns in Bogota, but it is a strange calm. Every few minutes there is heavy firing. The troops are still trying to clean out snipers."

Hangover. Fifteen minutes after Gaitan died. Don Fabio Lozano y Lozano, Liberal who had been War Minister until Conservative Ospina Perez scrapped his coalition cabinet last month, knocked at the door of the Presidential Palace. Soon other Liberals arrived. The result was a new coalition cabinet in which Liberals held half the seats. Its strong man: Dario Echandia, vigorous middle-of-the-roader and new Liberal leader, who took the key post of Minister of the Interior. Laureano Gomez was out.

President Ospina Perez went on the radio, denounced Gaitan's assassination, blamed the Communists for the upheaval that had stained Colombia's longtime reputation for orderly and democratic rule. This week, as a postscript, Colombia broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

Gaitan's assassin was too battered to be identified. But whether Gaitan had been killed by a Communist or not, the Red comrades showed that they knew how to make the most of the situation. The rapidity with which the disorders spread through Bogota and then to other Colombian cities certainly indicated skilled direction, if not considerable planning. And the result suited the party, right down to the ground. Said the New York Daily Worker: "Interruption of the Foreign Ministers' parley is a sock in the jaw to the Big Business men of the State Department."

Decision. As the gunfire died away and Bogota lay desolate, looted, gutted and under martial law, heads of conference delegations met to decide whether to stay in Bogota or to go home. In Santiago, the Chilean government declared that the conference must go on. Not all Latin-American countries were so sure. Finally the delegates made their decision: "To continue the important work with which the governments have charged them until they have fully completed the task . . . for which they were convened." But that did not necessarily mean that the conference would stay in ruined Bogota. There was doubt that shamefaced Colombia could continue as host to the great meeting of the Americas.

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