Gustavo Rojas Pinilla

Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (12 March 1900 – 17 January 1975) was a Colombian army general, civil engineer and politician who ruled as 19th President of Colombia in a military dictatorship from June 1953 to May 1957.

Rojas was born in the city of Tunja, Boyacá, on March 12, 1900, to Julio Rojas Jiménez and his wife, Hermencia Pinilla Suárez.

Spending his youth in Tunja, Villa de Leyva, and Arcabuco, he studied at the Tunja School of Presentation and earned a secondary degree at the Normal School of Tunjasu Leiva.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1917, he entered the José María Córdova Military School in Bogotá as a cadet in 1917, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1920.

In 1923 while serving in Manizales, Caldas, he was promoted to lieutenant in the army.

He became dissatisfied with the army and in 1924 he requested permission to retire from active service.

He continued his education at Tri-State College in the United States, where he obtained a degree in civil engineering in 1927 while working the assembly line at a Ford factory.

Returning to Colombia, he started taking part in the construction of highways and other works of engineering, managing the construction of the highway from Belén to Socha.

In 1932, Rojas returned to the Army as Colombia went to war against Peru over the region.

Recommissioned as a captain, he was posted to the 1st Artillery Group in Bogotá.

In 1933, being assigned to command the coastal batteries of Buenaventura, a port city that was believed to be vulnerable to Peruvian attack.

Buenaventura never came under attack, but the war concluded that year with the Rio Protocol, which recognized Colombia's claim to the disputed territory.

In 1936, he became the lead engineer of the army's ammunition factory; that same year, he was sent as an envoy to Nazi Germany, in order to obtain necessary machinery for munitions production in Bogotá.

On his return to Colombia, he was named chief of the factory's technical department.

Rojas Pinilla gained prominence as a colonel during La Violencia, the period of civil strife in Colombia during the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw infighting between the ruling Conservatives and Liberal guerillas, and was named to the cabinet of Conservative President Mariano Ospina Pérez.

During this period, Rojas Pinilla also served as director of the Artillery School (from 1942) and assistant director of the School of War (from 1944).

In 1943, he visited the United States to secure weapons and other material, this time in the form of Lend Lease aid during the Second World War.

In 1945, he was named as Director General of Civil Aviation (at the time, an agency of the Ministry of War).

It was there where he presented his project for airports in Colombia under the title "Landing Strips in Colombia," which served as a dissertation for his promotion to colonel of the Army; he would subsequently bring this initiative into being with the El Dorado Airport.

In 1946, now a colonel, Rojas was nominated as commander of the First Brigade in Tunja and in 1948 was named commander of the Third Brigade in Cali.

There, he gained major recognition in the country for having managed to appease the rebellion that happened in this region as a consequence of the assassination of the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, for which he was honoured by the incumbent Conservative President Mariano Ospina Pérez.

On October 11, 1949, he was promoted to Lieutenant General and on October 19 assigned to the Army General Staff.

On December 3, 1949, Rojas was appointed as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.

in the government of President Mariano Ospina Pérez.

The ascension of Rojas in the military occurred during a schism in the ruling Conservative Party, between the moderate "Ospinists", supporters of the outgoing president, and the "Laureanists", supporters of the extreme right-wing Laureano Gómez Castro who was elected in 1950.

Gómez was highly unpopular with Liberals, and even many Conservatives did not trust him to stem the escalating violence.

Rojas himself belonged to the "Ospinist" camp, as evidenced by his promotion by Ospina over other officers with longer service time.

In 1951, he was nominated as a delegate for Colombia to the United Nations in Washington, and as such he inspected the Colombia Battalion, then attached to the American 21st Infantry Regiment fighting in the Korean War.

Rojas took offense at the overseas posting, which he interpreted as an intentional slight on Gómez's part, and returned to Colombia in September 1952.

In 1952, he was ascended to General of the Army and appointed as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of Colombia by Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez, who was serving as interim president while Gómez took a leave of ill health.

When Gómez returned to office, he ordered the immediate removal of Rojas; the Minister of War Lucio Pabón Núñez, an ally of Rojas, resigned rather than comply with the order.

At this point, Ospina resolved to move decisively against Gómez.

In 1953, he mounted a successful coup d'état against Ospina's successor as president, the extreme right-wing Laureano Gómez Castro, imposing martial law.

Seeking to reduce political violence, he ruled the country as a military dictatorship, allying himself with trade unionists, implementing infrastructure programs, and extending female suffrage.

The former president contacted Rojas, who was at his finca in Melgar, on June 13, 1953.

Rojas, who had been waiting for the situation to erupt, took the Caldas Battalion to the Casa de Nariño and, with Gómez nowhere to be found, offered power to interim president Urdaneta.

He was forced to step down due to public pressure in 1957.

Rojas Pinilla founded the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO) in 1961 in opposition to the National Front, the power-sharing agreement which the Conservatives and Liberals had brokered after he had been deposed.

He contested the 1970 presidential election but was defeated by the National Front candidate, Conservative lawyer Misael Pastrana Borrero.

However, Rojas Pinilla and his supporters alleged that the election had been fraudulent and illegitimate; the results caused ANAPO supporters to form M-19 guerilla movement, which would contribute to the country's insurgency unrest in the second half of the 20th century.