The Bogotazo in Ecuador

Abstract

The assassination of the Colombian liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948 in the midst of the ninth Pan-American conference in Bogotá had international repercussions. Conservatives were eager to place blame for the massive riots known as the bogotazo on foreign communist influences that had allegedly manipulated an otherwise peaceful public to act in an irrational fashion. The propaganda campaign against the communists extended internationally, with significant ramifications in neighboring Ecuador where government officials asked for United States assistance in surveillance of perceived leftist subversives. The Pan-American conference reflected a decline of the united front collaborationist policies against fascism that characterized the second world war and a rise of the repressive environment of the cold war. While communists continued to present their actions as defending national economic and political interests, United States diplomatic officials shifted from seeing communists as an internal domestic matter to representing an international crisis that needed to be confronted. Even as these diplomats claimed that they embraced policies of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, it grew apparent that they continued political surveillance programs that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had developed during the war.