The National Front, 1958–78
Those who engineered the fall of Rojas were determined to cure their country of the partisan animosities that first produced La Violencia and then led, indirectly, to Rojas’s rather mild dictatorship. Their solution was the National Front (Frente Nacional), a bipartisan coalition whose system of government was first approved by plebiscite and would last through four presidential terms. Liberals and Conservatives would alternate in the presidency while equally sharing cabinet posts and other appointive offices. Positions in Congress, department assemblies, and municipal councils were likewise allocated equally to the two parties until the return of unrestricted electoral competition in 1974. But the other key aspect of the National Front, the equal sharing of appointive positions—in which more was at stake because far more people were involved—was extended another four years, so that the system formally expired in 1978. Even after that, much of it remained in effect.
The power-sharing plan succeeded brilliantly in its primary objective: Liberals and Conservatives no longer had an incentive to fight each other, and many lost interest altogether in their ancient rivalry. Political violence diminished sharply, thanks not only to the elimination of traditional antagonisms but also to a combination of military action and social assistance in specific areas. Furthermore, the charge most commonly made against the arrangement, that it stifled democracy by totally excluding other parties, is not entirely accurate. Quite apart from the relative insignificance of other parties in Colombia up to that point, they could still take part in elections by presenting themselves as dissident factions of either major party and competing for a share of that party’s quota of seats in Congress or some other body.
The communists continued to compete, and occasionally win election, by the expedient of calling themselves Liberals on election day. Even more successful was the movement headed by Rojas on his return from temporary exile and known as the Popular National Alliance (Anapo). It ran candidates under both party labels, put a sizeable contingent in Congress, and nominated Rojas for president in 1970, for a term that under National Front rules had to go to a Conservative. Combining populist appeals to leftist nationalism and Roman Catholic traditionalism—–a mixture of “vodka and holy water,” one critic observed—he came close to winning a plurality, in a race against three more conventional Conservative candidates. According to his supporters and some others, Rojas did win, but backcountry chicanery deprived him of the presidency.
The alleged electoral fraud in 1970 seriously weakened perceptions of the National Front’s legitimacy. The system also had certain undesirable and unintended consequences. The internal factions of each major party competed for their party’s guaranteed share of offices in a way that was often unseemly even though it could never affect the balance between the parties, all of which tended to discredit the political system generally. Apart from the Anapo phenomenon, which with the declining health of Rojas soon petered out after the 1970 election, party politics simply became less interesting. Indeed, in some quarters there was outright revulsion against the existing regime, to the extent that a varied assortment of disaffected Colombians threw in their lot with the leftist guerrillas that began to make their appearance just as La Violencia wound down.
One guerrilla organization was the pro-Soviet Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an outgrowth of earlier communist self-defense forces that never made peace with Rojas and survived the military offensives launched against them by the National Front. The FARC remained a largely campesino force, whereas the National Liberation Army (ELN), inspired by the Cuban Revolution, attracted more urban students and professionals. A smaller group, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), was of Maoist inspiration. These were only the most important guerrilla forces, but by the mid-1970s all had seemingly been contained in large but remote areas where the presence of the state had been close to nonexistent and where the guerrillas were mostly out of sight and out of mind.
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