Gunfire at Midnight

One midnight last week, Boyaca's Conservative Representative Carlos del Castillo, 30, rose in Colombia's Congress to denounce the Liberal Party. Warmed by a visit to the congressional bar, and fighting mad at the Liberal majority's bill to advance the presidential elections from 1950 to 1949, del Castillo shouted insults so fast that radio listeners could not understand him. Baby-faced Liberal Gustavo Jimenez Jimenez, also from Boyaca, tried to interrupt. Said del Castillo: "I'm ready to listen to Representative Jimenez on condition that he talk like a man as we are used to doing in Boyaca."

Jimenez, who had also been to the bar, replied with a derogatory remark about people who change their names. Del Castillo admitted that he had once changed his. Then he added: "At least I'm legitimate. You're not."

Jimenez reached for the pistol in his belt. Del Castillo pulled his revolver and was joined by aging Conservative Amadeo Rodriguez, who had his automatic in hand. All three fired simultaneously. Jimenez was killed, Rodriguez' shoulder was grazed, but del Castillo, who had quickly ducked behind the chamber president's rostrum, was unhurt.

From hip and shoulder holsters of a third of the 70-odd Congressmen present came pistols. For three minutes, while noncombatants flopped on the floor, some 50 bullets whizzed across the chamber. A few splattered the glass and plasterwork of the dome. Three Congressmen were hit.

Fast police work kept Bogota's Liberals from starting a riot in the streets outside. Del Castillo rushed to the safety of a Bogota police station. Liberal householders put up black flags for Jimenez, and for two days partisans lined up in two-block queues to shuffle past the martyr's bier in the Capitolio's Salon Eliptico. At week's end a solemn crowd of 10,000 gathered in the Plaza Bolivar to hear post-funeral tributes to the first man ever killed on the floor of Congress.

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