Happy Birthday Gaitán.- Axis21

Today Sunday, January 23, 2022, we are commemorating the 124th anniversary of the birth of the liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán Ayala, vilely murdered 74 years ago

Considered in the country as a true leader and one of the most renowned criminals in the history of Colombian law, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán Ayala was the eldest of 6 brothers, humble extraction, son of a school teacher, Manuela Ayala, recognized by hisLiberal positions and his father, Eliecer Gaitán Otálora, who undertook business, as libraries of old books and newspapers, also a liberal opposition.He was born in Bogotá on January 23, 1898 on 1st Street.# 8 - 24, from the Las Cruces neighborhood, where the Andrey cafeteria currently works.I was 50 years old when he was killed.

His preparation and professional practice as a lawyer was recognized not only in the country, but also abroad.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a restless boy for all kinds of knowledge, voracious reader, but his main strength was undoubtedly the oratory, capacity that took advantage of both in law, in the audiences, as in the public square, in politics.

Gaitán entered the National University in February 1920, to the Law Faculty, although his father wanted him to exercise a more practical office to help the whole family, and for his academic determination he decided to get him out of his house;However, as a university student, he always had the support of his mother.

Gaitan's degree thesis at the end of his law career, in 1924 at 26 years of age, was a compendium of his political thinking, with the title of, socialist ideas in Colombia.

As a litigator, Gaitán exercised criminal law and his interest in this area was due to the possibility he offered to use his oratory, but especially to defend the people most punished by a social order that not only excluded them, but also isolated themWith serious convictions.

Herbert Braun recounts in his book, Gaitán killed his first case.In July 1923, without having even completed his studies, he defended a small merchant convicted in the first instance for stealing a wealthy Tolimense negotiator who had the monopoly of the brandy.In his defense, the lawyer highlighted the social inequalities that allowed the powerful to obtain advantages over the weakest and the injustice committed by debts that exploited merchants.

The defense of the citizen Moisés García, accused of the death of two people in the municipality of Cocuy, in 1937;As Garcia was recognized by the neighbors as the enemy of the spoiled family López, he was accused of the intellectual authorship of the crime.Gaitán managed to completely distort the accusation for based on conjectures about enmity between families and general suggestion, without the need to go to scientific evidence or psychological studies of the accused, nor to the ballistics tests, something new for the time.

In 1926, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán traveled to the Royal University of Rome to specialize in Criminal Law and won the Enrico Ferri Award for his thesis, qualified Magna Cum Laude, the positive criteria of premeditation and historians Adriana Rodríguez and Gilberto Parada, they said ofHe: “Gaitán recognized his admiration for the doctrines of Enrico Ferri and Cesare Lombroso.The first was praised for humanizing criminal law and turning man into an object of study and main actor of criminology;To the second he raised him to the cusp of genius for interpreting the psychic causes of crime with the elements extracted from morphology ».

However, the case that gave the most resonance in his image as a brilliant criminal, was the discussed and controversial, defense of Lieutenant Jesús María Cortés Poveda, murderer of the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa, born in Caramanta and based with his family since the age of 16years, in Manizales, owner of the newspaper La Voz de Caldas.So important was the process, that Gaitán's final intervention was transmitted by radio.The triumph that Gaitán obtained by achieving the military's freedom was known throughout the country.

73 years ago, on the morning of April 9, 1948, Friday, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, celebrated one of his successes as a litigant, went out to the seventh race of Bogotá with several friends, at one in the afternoon, near the avenueJiménez, received four shots, enough to reap his life.

Remember the author Bogota Hebert Braun in his work killed Gaitan: public life and urban violence in Colombia, who, being a modern politician, his colleagues mocked Gaitán, while feared.They felt that public life belittled, that stained it with small daily details.They, on the other hand, felt that politics was not done with the people, but above the people.They were not men of action.They practiced contemplative life, conversation and dialogue.

They did not seek, as Gaitán did, to speak directly about their immediate needs and their daily ambitions.In the emotional bond that Gaitán tried to achieve with each individual of the people who listened to it, they saw demagogy and vulgarity.Gaitán was a dangerous man, because he interfered privately in the public.The people followed him as a particular man, and not as much as a statesman.

Gaitán was the politician of his generation who was traveling through the country by distributing soap and toothpaste, which supplied the taxi drivers uniform.He wanted to eliminate the use of the ruana, since it considered it a very long garment that hid an even greater dirt.As mayor of the capital, he went out at dawn to make sure that the garbage was properly collected.He was the one who worried that the Real Street - the Seventh - and its sidewalks were in good condition for passers -by of the city to reach their daily chores without major difficulties in public roads.He even put public baths for the most private needs, in the center of the city.

Gaitán founded his own newspaper, and called it a day, a term that among its various meanings means the hours of one day of work.He told Luis David Peña, the first director of the newspaper: «Things must be called by name.We cannot speak in euphemisms, or deviate with useless words the direction of our thinking.You have to speak a direct language to the people ».At the same time, for Gaitán, private life was a life of passions, of emotions, which were a means to mobilize the people, to comment with the nation.I was looking for a balance between reason and passion.He opposed "to the verbalist criteria of politics.I cannot accept the postulate that has invaded minds, even of new generations, according to which waves, fervent love to ideals make man an insubstantial and romantic being

Gaitán was inspired by a social conception that is now overreated.He understood that the human being is largely the result of the social context in which he develops, and that the individual could be improved through action, especially collective action.This idea did not come from Marxism, but from the legal positivism of Enrico Ferri that he learned in Italy.

For the chiefs of the parties, Gaitán was a fright, an irresponsible and dangerous man who turned on what they feared as the primitive passions of the people.But Gaitán was not a revolutionary, nor a socialist.Perhaps it was a scramble.Man of moderate ideas, had an untimely style that came to him by his personality, for a certain social resentment and for the parsimony of the public life of the time.Because it was precisely the overlapping style of his colleagues that caused so much.What Gaitán was most feared was the revolution, and he had convinced that, if the country's leaders did not put themselves aware of the changes that occurred around them, if they did not integrate the people into the nation, if they did not seek a better balanceBetween the political country and the national country, the excluded people were going on them.«In Colombia you have two countries: the political country that thinks of its jobs, in its mechanics and in its possession, and the national country that thinks of its work, its health, in its culture, neglected by the political country.The political country has different routes to those of the national country.Tremendous drama in the history of a town! "

Between Thursday night and the early morning of the terrible Friday, April 9 Gaitán points another sound triumph in his office as a criminal lawyer, to disenchantFrom the murder in cold blood, in a state of helplessness, by the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa, director of the newspaper "La Voz de Caldas", which occurred in Manizales on October 12, 1938.

After the public hearing, before heading to his home, Dr. Jorge Eliécer took a couple of drinks, in which he was going to be his last dinner, at the restaurant "Marroco".The chronicles of the time say that Gaitán went home in his car at two in the morning of the unfortunate day.No one imagined that he would die eleven hours later.

The remarkable writer and journalist Alejandro Vallejo Personal friend of Gaitán, a native of Manizales, -April 21, 1902 -was a witness to exception of the mortal attack of the magnicide Juan Roa Sierra, at 1:05 in the afternoon, in the heart of the heart of thecapital city.The consummated political chronicler towards the group that was going to have lunch with the lead