Peasant poet’s efforts to bring peace to Colombia ended in deaths and disaster

Belisario Betancur, who has died aged 94, was a Colombian statesman who championed peace in Central America and at home, but whose one term as president was marred by a guerrilla assault on the country’s highest court and a volcanic eruption that turned an entire town into a mud-covered graveyard.

Serving as president from 1982-86, Betancur was something of a novelty in a country that had long been led by wealthy elites. The son of peasants in Colombia’s rugged interior, he said he was the first of his 21 siblings to wear shoes. He went on to graduate from law school and work as a journalist and economist, occasionally writing poetry.

A populist member of the

Conservative

Party, Betancur was a charismatic campaigner whose message of peace and prosperity seemed to resonate in a country that was rapidly modernising.

‘‘He finds out what people want, and then he says what they want to hear, in the language and style of the television drama,’’ former Colombian president Alfonso Lopez Michelsen told the Washington Post in 1982. ‘‘He has taken politics from the academic to the ranch house and the tango.’’

Betancur established a distance education system, led literacy efforts that were credited with cutting the country’s illiteracy rate from 20 per cent to about 8 per cent, and was a leading sponsor of the Contadora Group, which sought unsuccessfully to end conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

But his term in office was largely defined by Colombia’s own long-running conflict with leftist guerrilla groups, which began in the mid-1960s and ultimately cost more than 220,000 lives, according to a government tally. He also waged an escalating battle with ‘‘bad sons of Colombia’’, his name for drug traffickers such as Pablo Escobar.

Betancur held secret meetings with guerrillas in an effort to negotiate an end to the conflict. Three months after his inauguration, he signed legislation that gave an amnesty to most. Then, in 1984, he secured ceasefire agreements with two of the leading rebel groups: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, and M-19, a guerrilla movement based in the cities.

It marked a high point of his presidency – but gave way to mordant jokes as gunfire resumed between Right-wing paramilitary groups and the guerrillas, and kidnappings and targeted killings persisted. Among the most devastating attacks was the April 1984 murder of Betancur’s minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara, by a motorcycle-riding assassin later linked to Escobar.

His efforts to forge a national peace effectively came to an end on November 6, 1985, when 35 members of M-19 seized the

‘‘In truth, he wasn’t a leader who loved poetry. He was a poet on whom fate imposed the penance of power.’’

Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Belisario Betancur

Palace of Justice, which houses the Supreme Court in Bogota, taking hundreds of government workers hostage.

In an attack sometimes described in Colombia as ‘‘the holocaust’’, the military launched an allout assault on the building, firing artillery and driving a tank through its doors. About 100 people died, including 11 of the court’s 24 justices, and about a dozen people were later found to have been taken by the military and ‘‘disappeared’’.

About 6000 criminal case files were destroyed during the assault, and Escobar was later said to have paid M-19 about US$1 million to carry out the attack and destroy evidence against his cartel.

About a week later, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, burying the town of Armero in mud and leaving 25,000 people dead.

Betancur was roundly criticised for his handling of both events. The Bogota newspaper El Tiempo called the period ‘‘the 30 most disastrous days in Colombian history’’, a month known as ‘‘Black November’’.

Betancur left office the following year. It was a further 30 years before the war with Farc was formally ended.

Belisario Betancur Cuartas was born in the coal-mining town of Amaga, and served as labour minister and ambassador to Spain before becoming president. He made headlines early in his term for declining to host the 1986 World Cup in Colombia. It was too much of a financial burden, he said, adding that any loss in prestige was made up for by novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez winning the Nobel prize in literature.

The two men became friends, with Garcia Marquez recalling one incident in which he accidentally called the presidential palace at 3am and was surprised to find Betancur was awake. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ the president told him. ‘‘In this job this is the only time of day I can find to read poetry.’’

‘‘In truth, he wasn’t a leader who loved poetry,’’ said Garcia Marquez. ‘‘He was a poet on whom fate imposed the penance of power.’’

In the years after he left office, he largely disappeared from the political arena but served as chairman of the Truth Commission for El Salvador and as president of the Pan American Health Organisation in Washington.

He had three children with his wife of more than 50 years, Rosa Helena Alvarez, who died in 1998. In 2000, he married Dalia Rafaela Navarro. – Washington Post