Talk:Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

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[edit] Birth date

The true birth date for Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is 1903 not not 1898.

When was it? WP says 23 January 1898, Britannica claims 26 January 1902, and other sources state it was 23 January 1903.--Julián Ortega - drop me a message 15:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Investigation of his death can still be done

There is no "mainstream accounts" of the murder, as the Colombian public in general does not know the details of what happened. Colombians are still waiting for further investigation in particular based of the information Gloria Gaitán has collected. There are many questions still unanswered that cannot be solved just waiting for CIA to disclose its documents. There are witnesses and people still alive having potential useful information to answer questions such as:

a) Who was that person accompanying Juan Roa Sierra when he show up at Jorge Eliecer Gaitán office requesting to talk with him the day before the assassination.?

b) Juan Roa was visiting from time to time a palmist, a person supposedly of German origin. Was this palmist by any chance the person who may have introduced Roa to John Mepples Espirito? Did he on purpose introduced new ideas on him to motivate him to do what he did?

c) Does the Cuban video still exists or ever existed, and can it be retrieved?

d) Are the two police officers that stopped Juan Roa after the assassination still alive? Can they confirm that they were instructed to abandon Juan Roa to the mob?

e) Does any body have more information about Mepples Espiritu and his activities in the university under the name of Georgio Ricco? What about the Cuban woman with whom he was living after supposedly being many years in a Cuban prison, is she still alive to provide more information?

f) What about intelligence information gather by other Countries?

g) What about the mistress of Virgilio Barco, or any of her friends, can they confirm the story about him letting the police officers abandon Juan Roa to the crowd?


Those questions are interesting. They are certainly valid and would merit being addressed by researchers and investigators. However, if you read history books written by historians both Colombian and otherwise, you'll see that the general context of the murder and its aftermath (outside of the specific points of dispute, that is, such as who would be ultimately responsible and exactly why) constitutes a set of facts and information that has been publicly known for many years and has been repeated many times, and which does constitute a corpus of knowledge that is usually accepted by the mainstream, so mainstream accounts do exist, if one looks for them. Logically, the finer details (and the resulting questions) are usually only known by those that care to investigate further. The problem is that, in recent years, genuine concerns are often easily confused with pre-fabricated conspiracy theories of all kinds (some being more reasonable than others, of course, but there are too many of them already).Juancarlos2004 16:22, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citations missing tag

Now that there are many citations in place should this tag be removed? I think so, once there is a source for the controversial claim that the United Fruit ordered the Columbian Army to attack the strike in 1928. I have looked, and can find no reliable source. Unless it is added soon, I will edit the claim to just that the Columbian Army killed the strikers - and I will remove the tag unless there is some objection. Raggz (talk) 05:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] John Foster Dulles

United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was an avowed opponent of Communism whose law firm had represented United Fruit. His brother Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA. The brother of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot had once been president of United Fruit Company. This seems irrelevant. Dulles would not become Secretary of State for five more years. Raggz (talk) 05:36, 30 January 2008 (UTC)