The Urge to Kill

Colombia's backlands blood feud between Liberals and Conservatives goes on, only partly muffled by the iron censorship of President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Last week, from Strongman Rojas himself, came a communique on the fighting. In one of his rare press interviews, he told the Chicago Daily News's John B. McDermott that this year the struggle has cost 2,000 or more lives.*

The warfare, originally a Liberal guerrilla revolt against the oppression of a Conservative dictatorship, lost its point two years ago when General Rojas, though a Conservative himself, got fed up and overthrew the regime. The fighting slackened for a time--but the habit of bloodshed proved too strong. "Liberals kill Conservatives, then Conservatives kill

Liberals," Rojas complained to Newsman McDermott. "One killing leads to another."

His failure to stamp out guerrilla warfare has apparently left Rojas embarrassed and angry; his irate closing of Colombia's biggest daily, El Tiempo, last August followed his charge that the paper had reported a car-accident death as a political murder. Most foreign observers think that such highhanded measures have cost Rojas heavily in popularity. But President Rojas angrily insists that the country is still with him: "Ninety percent of the people back my government," he said. Mc-Dermott's eyebrows shot up. "Ninetynine percent," snapped Rojas.

*At the New Orleans meeting of the Inter-American Press Association last week, Barranquilla Editor Julian Devis Echandia, defending Rojas' censorship on the ground that Colombia is "in a state of war," said that the six-year death toll in his country's civil war has now reached 150,000.

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