Demolishing Legitimacy: Bogotá’s Urban Reforms for the 1948 Pan-American Conference

Abstract

Traditional accounts of the 1948 Bogotazo – the riot in Bogotá, Colombia, sparked by the assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán – have overlooked the urban context that explains the extent of the destruction. Preparing to host the 1948 IX Pan-American Conference, Bogotá had undergone aggressive urban reforms that financially burdened and dispossessed residents. More than just a political figure, Gaitán was recognised as an urban advocate for the marginalised. They responded to his death by destroying reform projects and symbols of political authority. Informed by architectural journals, legislation and periodicals, this article shows that Bogotá’s elite and dispossessed alike inscribed their political projects onto the urban landscape.

Equivocal Challenges: Tactical Ambiguity and Deferral of Claim-Making in the 1948 Bogotazo

“…In a laudable effort to push back against dismissive views that the Bogotazo was a mere "riot" ran by an irrational "mob" (Sánchez Gómez 1984: 1; Braun 1985: 4), historians have often been tempted to articulate grievances on behalf of the protesters, suggesting, inter alia, that the collective violence unleashed in Bogotá implicitly bemoaned socio-economic inequalities (Martz 2012(Martz [1962), the soaring cost of life (Sharpless 1978;Aprile-Gniset 1983), the influence of American imperialism on politics and of international capitalism on the economy (Sánchez Gómez 1984), the oligarchic pact between Conservative and Liberal elites (Medina 1984), a highly exclusionary political order (Braun 1985), the failure of Gaitanist populism (Pécaut 1987;Henderson 2001), the power of the Conservative party and the Church (Arias Trujillo 1998), a manufacturing economy dominated by a putting-out system (Sowell 1998), or the city's forced Haussmannization in previous years (Oelze 2017).…”