Bull-Ring Massacre

The day before last week's bullfights in Bogota, the Colombian government announced cryptically that it was taking "fitting measures" to head off opposition "political manifestations'' in the huge Santamaria bull ring. The measures turned out to be novel as well as fitting: the regime bought $15,000 worth of tickets and distributed them to thousands of policemen, plainclothesmen and government employees. On bullfight day the official ticketholders were waved through the gates; other fans were carefully frisked for weapons.

Inside, the government boys took up their positions and sent up lusty vivas for President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Soon anti-Rojas spectators began to give themselves away by their glowering silences or muttered retorts. When the oppositionists were fully identified, the bullyboys opened up. Whipping out blackjacks, knives and guns, they attacked in milling fury. Victims were tossed screaming over the guardrails high above exit passageways; hundreds of others were toppled into the arena. Pistols banged away. The toll: at least eight dead, 50 hurt.

Cheers & Whistles. The strong-arm show was clearly punitive. A week before, at the season's gay opening bullfight, the crowd had cheered for ten minutes when former President Alberto Lleras Camargo, who symbolizes opposition to Strongman Rojas Pinilla, arrived and took a seat. No sooner had the cheering died down than the President's 22-year-old daughter Maria Eugenia and her husband, pro-government Publisher Samuel Moreno, stepped into the presidential box. In the Colombian equivalent for booing, the throng angrily whistled them out of the stadium--an insult that doubtless threw hot-tempered General Rojas Pinilla into a boiling rage.

But a brutal and senseless mob attack, besides turning the stomach of even his warm supporters, apparently went beyond the dictator's intentions. He blustered that the opposition's "intellectual guerrillas" were to blame, and threatened to "fight back without quarter." He also moved fast to hush up news of the massacre. By quickly blocking news cables, the government successfully kept the story out of most papers abroad; only travelers' reports, days later, spelled out the ugly truth. The government's censors muzzled the local press.

Unsavory Distinction. The one Colombian paper that got the story into print, Medellin's responsible El Colombiano, was closed down by the device of moving the government's censorship office to an out-of-town military post, where editors were ordered to bring all copy. Since the same move shut two other Medellin papers, Rojas Pinilla, who has blotted out all of Bogota's oldest and best dailies, briefly achieved the unsavory distinction of silencing all of Colombia's best-known papers. After thinking it over, the Medellin dailies doggedly submitted to the awkward censorship and reappeared. But their prospects were gloomy under Rojas Pinilla, who seemed to be bucking for renown as Latin America's stubbornest tyrant.

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