Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala Spanish pronunciation: ['xoɾxe eʎ'eθeɾ gai'tan aʝala] (23 January 1903 – 9 April 1948) was a Colombian politician with nationalist ideals and leader of the Liberal Party.

[2] He was assassinated during his second presidential campaign in 1948, setting off the Bogotazo [3] and leading to a violent period of political unrest in Colombian history known as La Violencia (approx.

Born in Bogotá to parents who were rank-and-file members of the Liberal Party, Gaitán and his family had a tenuous hold in the middle class.

[10] Through his student leadership roles and intellectual ambitions, Gaitán shaped his dreams of becoming Colombian President to combat political, social, and economic inequality.

[10] He drew inspiration from university students in Lima, Peru who were successful in their attempts for an educational extension program formulated for workers.

[9] As President of the University Center, Gaitán traveled throughout the city expressing the goals of the organization, focusing on social and proletariat apprehensions.

Gaitán used his skills as a lawyer and as an emerging politician in order to defend workers' rights and called for accountability to those involved in the Santa Marta Massacre.

[13] In 1933, he created the "Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria" ("National Leftist Revolutionary Union"), or UNIR, as his own dissident political movement after he had broken with the Liberal Party.

[citation needed] It is said that Gaitán's main political asset was his profound and vibrant oratory, often classified as populist by contemporaries and later analysts.

[15] In particular, he repeatedly divided the country into the oligarchy and the people and called the former corrupt and the latter admirable, worthy, and deserving of Colombia's moral restoration.

He stirred the audience's emotions by aggressively denouncing social, moral and economical evils stemming both from the Liberal and Conservative Parties and promised his supporters that a better future was possible if they all worked together.

[16] Gaitán was warned by US Ambassador Beaulac on 24 March 1948 that Communists were planning a disruption of the impending conference and that his Liberal Party would likely be blamed.

The reforms were designed to broaden the reach of state governance by incentivizing political participation among actors such as farmers, peasants, and middle and lower-class citizens.

[18] The "Plataforma de Colón" included various provisions designed to reduce the levels of income inequality in Colombia through fortification of the production force.

In addition to these reforms, the platform extended proposals to specializing education for wider accessibility, redistributing land, enhancing labor protest laws, and heightening the legal codes of the judiciary.

The foreign policy outlooks of the platform intended to inaugurate a conference to create an economic union among different nation-states in Latin America.

Gaitán was named Minister of Education in 1940 under the administration of the Liberal Party's Eduardo Santos (1938–1942), where he promoted an extensive literacy campaign as well as cultural activities.

At the conclusion of the Liberal Party's national convention in 1945 he was proclaimed as "the people's candidate" in a public square, an unusual setting under the political customs at the time.

[20][13] Gaitán was then the leading opponent of the use of violence and had determined to pursue the strategy of electing a left-wing government, and he had repudiated the violent communist revolutionary approach that was typical of the Cold War era.

[21] His assassination directly led to a period of great violence between conservatives and liberals and also facilitated the rise of the existing communist guerrillas.

[24] According to one version, Roa Sierra acted under the orders of CIA agents John Mepples Spirito (alias Georgio Ricco) and Tomás Elliot, as part of an anti-leftist plan that was supposedly called Operation Pantomime.

[26] An eyewitness to the actual events, Guillermo Pérez Sarmiento, Director of the United Press in Colombia, stated that upon his arrival Roa was already "between two policemen" and describes in detail the angry mob that kicked and "tore him to pieces" and does not suggest any police involvement.

Also in the city that day was another young man who would become a giant of 20th-century Latin-American history: Colombian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

A young law student and short story writer at the time, García Márquez was eating lunch near the scene of the assassination.