Rodrigo Lara introduced me to Galan, precisely in the Barrio Jose Antonio Galan in Neiva, in a public rally organized by great popular leaders of the era as the Black Pine, Marcelo Padilla and Eduardo “El Ronco” Alvarez. At that time gathered in a dusty streets, about five hundred people eager to hear the two leaders. I accompanied my father, who at the time was Deputy of the newly founded New Liberalism. As in all such acts, a world of people spoke, but I remember with great admiration the speech Rodrigo, far exceeding that of its new head. They were beautiful times of politics! People voted with passion, without interest, for conviction. The leaders did not ask for silver and were proud of having a candidate in his own home. The speeches were delivered and heard with the heart. Images inflamed tempers.
That is to say everything was different. Luis Carlos Galan in New Liberalism was founded in 1979, but I always thought that this movement was just a cop guard to the entrance of Rodrigo Lara. At that time the New Liberalism really took national dimensions and initiated a very fruitful period in Colombian history. Galan was a man on. Their culture was comparable to that of Carlos Lleras, the proportions of age, among other reasons because he read with enviable speed and had a memory like that of Lara.
His speech was smooth, deep, passionate and resourceful. But it was also a cold man, with little sense of humor and messianic. I believed blindly that the country would emerge from their problems if elected president and had us convinced that all his followers. One of the hardest periods for Huila Beau was one in which Rodrigo Lara, Minister of Justice of Belisario Betancourt, was accused of receiving drug money. We remember with sadness and pain, and Galan, badly advised, decided to leave in the hands of a court decision Guarantee support or ask the head of their representative in government. Galan was not loyal to his most important political friend and one of his closest personal friends. And Lara died without forgiveness. Eight days before his assassination, I attended a meeting in his father’s house, in which Rodrigo told us his thoughts on the future presidential debate and he told us he was planning to travel to Eastern Europe as an ambassador for long enough to write a couple books and to devise the political platform of a National Movement Center Left that he would lead to his return. If the election were tomorrow, he said, the winner would undoubtedly be boat, but Otto Morales Benitez is not disposable. Galan’s candidacy even considered it! That night we eat, with the top brass of the movement, Restaurant Las Vegas. Asked Galan told us that he had called the Ministry of Justice yesterday but not caused him to pass the phone. All insist that should tone down the fight with drug trafficking, but he informed us that the war was to the last consequences. Rodrigo assertion in almost everything: their fight was to the last consequences, Trouser withdrew his candidacy and never came to the presidency. Barco won those elections. What we could never vote for Lara was the Chief Executive. He would have been the best president of this century.
