Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

Colombia’s most important populist leader of the 20th century. Gaitán built a cross-class coalition of urban workers, artisans, the lower middle class, and rural peasants, framing politics not as Liberal vs. Conservative but as “el pueblo” against “la oligarquía.” His slogan: “Yo no soy un hombre, soy un pueblo” (“I am not a man, I am a people”).

Rose to prominence in 1929 by denouncing the United Fruit Company massacre of banana workers (the Masacre de las Bananeras). Served as mayor of Bogotá (1936), Minister of Education (1940), and Minister of Labor (1943–44). By 1948 he was the undisputed leader of the Liberal Party and widely expected to win the 1950 presidential election.

Assassinated on April 9, 1948, triggering the Bogotazo (one of the most destructive urban uprisings in Latin American history) and setting in motion La Violencia, a decade of civil war that killed 200,000–300,000 people.