The reasons for the bloodbath WHEN THE Colombian army's Cascabel tank shot down the high iron and cedar gate of the Palace of Justice in Bogota, it marked the start of one of the bloodiest and most ruthless actions carried out by the Colombian armed forces in the last thirty years.
Twenty-seven hours after the tank opened fire, under the eye of the television camaras, the cost of this act of war left Colombians shocked. More than a hundred persons were killed, including 35 civilians (clerks, lawyers, etc.) and 11 judges.
RODRIGO O' FARRELL
Moreover, the new building housing the Supreme Court of Justice, the Council of State, and the extensive libraries maintained by these highest judicial bodies of the country was reduced to ashes and twisted steel.
The day's losses also include some "disappeared" persons, the precise number of whom is not yet known.
The responsibility for the operation that led to the massacre was assumed by the Conservative president Belisario Betancur who in the first years of his term had managed to gain the aura of a populist leader and "peace maker" in Colombia and internationally. He had begun discussions with the Colombian guerrilla groups, signed an agreement for a ceasefire with most of them, and played a central role in founding the Contadora Group.
The assault on the Palace of Justice, however, recalled in the minds of many Colombians an event that has marked the political life of the country since 1948, another slaughter carried out under another Conservative government on April 9-10, 1948.
Aroused by the murder of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the Colombian people rose up spontaneously to try to topple the regime of Mariano Ospina Perez. Government soldiers, sheltered in their tanks, opened fire indiscriminately on the masses, who had only machetes and pistols.
The government was saved by the complicity of the Liberal Party lead. ers who refused to lead the uprising. April 9 has gone down in Colombian history as one of the main episodes of the so-called period of "la violencia,"
a full-fledged civil war launched by the reactionary political forces two years before, and whose end in 1957 represented a strategic defeat for the democratic aspirations of the masses. It gave rise to the era of restricted democracy that continues today.
Despite the change in the relationship of forces in favor of the proletariat and its allies in recent years, the massacre at the Palace of Justice seems to represent the opening of a similar period of trauma.
The confrontation opened at 11:40 pm, November 6, when 31 well-armed guerrillas alighted from two trucks. After some skirmishes with guards in the parking lot of the building, the guerrillas occupied the basement and four floors of the Palace, and began to face a team of police secret agents that came in to mount a counter-attack.
The guerrillas had not finished putting the hostages in order, when six Biazilian army Cascabel and Ururutu tanks, with 50-milimeter cannon, entered the Plaza de Bolivar. Two of them tried to enter the building, one through the main door and the other through the blocked parking area in the back.
At almost the same time, four police helicopters dropped specially trained "antiterrorist" troops on Terrace No. 16.
The Casa del Florero museum alongside the Palace of Justice was taken by the police and army and conheadquarters. This is wyere perations verted into a military operations tages who managed later to escape were taken. Some of the "rescued" civilians taken there disappeared with-
out trace, and without the authorities offering the slightest explanation.
Carlos Martinez Saenz, the director of Socorro Nacional (National Aid, who risked his life to take a message to the guerrillas, revealed that he saw three live guerrillas in the Casa del Florero taken prisoner by the military.
The armed forces, however, deny that they took any prisoners. At least one lawyer who was in the court on legal business at the time of the events and who got out alive has been declared missing by his colleagues.
In the meantime, in the Plaza de Bolivar, the armed forces rained bullets indiscriminately on the Palace without any consideration for the hundreds of civilians trapped there. The most well known of them, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court, Alfonso Reyes Echandia, made an urgent public appeal at 5:00 in the afternoon through a radio station that reached him by telephone.
"We are hostages of M-19. Our lives are in danger. Please tell the army to stop shooting. We all have guns pointed at us." He added; "The occupiers are ready to negotiate a solution to the situation on the basis of a concrete proposal, but for that they demand the withdrawal of the troops." The military take over
The government did not respond. Reyes Echandia tried desperately to talk to President Betancur over the telephone. The president refused to take his call. Five minutes later, three judges left the building safe and sound. Among them was the president's brother, Jaime Betancur Cuartas. A few days later in Mexico, a that a leader of M-19, Evert Busamante, said that Betancur was released to take a message to the president. But this version has not been confirmed.
By noon of Wednesday, Belisario Betancur knew of the guerrillas' demands, because they had sent a cassette through a Conservative journalist. Surrounded by four ministers, the president listened to the demands. They were to publish a declaration of M-19, as well as the minutes of the Committee to Oversee the Application of the Truce, to make public the deal the government had made with the International Monetary Fund, and to have time made available in the media "so that the nation can judge the government for its failure to carry out its promises of peace and its violation of the accords signed a year ago in Hobo, Corinto, and
Medellin." Betancur rejected all these demands out of hand.
The military operations were coordinated personally by the minister of defense, General Vega Uribe. When he was called to the president's palace, he demonstrated his lack of respect for Betancur's authority by taking an hour and a half to show up.
At 8:00 pm, Betancur convened the Council of Ministers. He proposed a line of action. The guerrillas were to be called upon to surrender unconditionally in exchange for a guarantee of their lives and an assurance that they would be tried before an ordinary court.
The ministers were still offering ideas about how to get this proposal to the guerrillas, when General Vega Uribe said that this plan was "inappropriate" because if the military siege were stopped, the guerrillas would interpret this as a victory and might even strengthen their defensive positions.
"All aspects of the operation are underway. If the Council agrees, we will continue." The ministers and the president indicated their assent.
The cathedral clock was striking 10:00 pm, when the army launched its second attack. A series of heavy bazooka missiles were aimed at the third floor. They exploded, shaking the neighboring buildings. Then flames began to devour the eastern wing of the building, causing the deaths of many hostages who were held there. Some of them tried to escape from the smoke, but were cut down by the hail of bullets.
The government propagandists tried to attribute this fire, which burned thousands of legal records, to the occupiers. They claimed that the M-19 had a deal with cocaine traffickers, who had threatened the judger considering extradition requests from …le US. In a clandestine news conference in Bogota on November 9, the M-19 rejected these charges.
Colombian public opinion could not understand what justified the carnage. The vengeful nature of this operation becomes clear if you take into consideration the traditional hatred of the professional armed forces for the judicial branch. Hundreds of judgements by military courts have been modified or overturned by the Supreme Court or the Council of State.
For example, the Council of State convicted General Miguel Vega Uribe in July of practising torture during the repressive campaigns of 1979 and 1982, when he was director of the Brigade of the Military Institutions. The army's appeal against this verdict was underway at the time of the November 6-7 events, and very likely the legal records of the investigation against Vega Uribe went up in smoke.
In the final phase of the assault, the troops took the second and third floors with the help of rocket and artillery fire. Monica, a guerilla who had held off several attacks with her machinegun, fell. A rocket knocked in the wall of a bathroom where the last group of hostages had found refuge, killing several of them.
The guerrillas' second in command, Andres Almarales, tried to get the civilians out. When they got to the first floor, the soldiers opened fire, killing almost all of them. The guerrillas left inside were overwhelmed and liquidated.
This was not the first time that Belisario Betancur had been implicated in a massacre. In the 1960s, when he was minister of labor, the Santa Barbara strikers got the same treatment. But this incident was quickly forgotten. He came to be seen as a "progressive" figure in the Conservative Party, and when he was elected president in 1982, his popularity went beyond his own party.
It was Betancur's stand for "peace" that won him this prestige, despite his economic policies, which were disastrous from the outset. His position was that the guerrillas could not be eliminated militarily.
He was met with suspicion by the more reactionary sectors and the army. The undercover struggle of these elements against Betancur became clear after March 28, 1984, when truce agreements were signed with the Communist Party-influenced guerrilla group, the FARC, which had the longest tradition and the most fire power. On August 24, after violent battles, the M-19 and the Maoist EPL signed similar accords with the government.
While the pact with the FARC was observed the one with the M-19 was not. The latter raised a hue and cry that the army was continuing major offensives against it, despite the accords. This led to a war of position in the moutains and the small towns of the sugar-growing province of the Valle Del Cauca, where the guerrilla group took heavy blows.
Reorganizing, the M-19 attacked the Armenia counterinsurgency forces base early in October, killing 32 soldiers and capturing 12, who were later released to a group of journalists. On October 23, it attempted unsuccessfully to kidnap General Rafael Samudio, commanding general of the armed forces.
Already before the holocaust of November 7-8, the president's popularity had reached a low point (only 18% supported him, according to the polls). The massacre dealt it a final International Viewpoint 9 December 1985
IRAN blow. Today, every politician is trying to avoid responsibility for the assault. The military showed from the outset that they were in control.
"Belisario is a prisoner of Vega Uribe," is what people are saying in Bogota, "since he did not fire the general when he was found guilty of practising torture."
In this context, the officers are stepping up their military and political activity. A few days after the slaughter, Ricardo Lara Parada, an opposition councillor with a guerrilla past, was shot down in Barrancaberema. A week after that, the EPL leader, William Calvo, was killed in a similar way. The main CP headquarters has been bombed.