Going Strong

Chatty and smiling, President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla last week made a confident reply to his critics, who now include six of Colombia's seven living ex-Presidents, some from Rojas' own Conservative Party and others from the opposition Liberals. The general complaint: Rojas' increasingly harsh measures, e.g., closing down the respected Bogota daily El Tiempo last August, are turning Colombia into an out-and-out military dictatorship, and costing the government heavily in prestige. Rojas' answer, made in an impromptu speech at the opening of an exhibit of public works: "I ask myself how the government can be losing prestige? Formerly Liberal governments persecuted Conservatives and many Conservative authorities persecuted Liberals, while today every Colombian knows--morning, noon and night--that the armed forces vigilantly guard his life, his honor and his property." Critics of this state of affairs, he said, were "intellectual guerrillas."

That sort of army-knows-best paternalism embarrasses and angers many Colombians, who recall the country's free, self-governing past. But few would deny that things are at least better than they were 2 1/2 years ago, and that confident General Rojas is firmly in power.

Rojas has kept the support of his army officers with hefty pay raises, gifts of TV sets and cars, and post-exchange stores that sell at wholesale prices everything from Paris lingerie to U.S. food-freezers. And the opposing politicos of both parties are, by long tradition, well-bred, cultured, often wealthy men, not prone to lead revolutionaries to the barricades. Admitted one: "If you gave me 50,000 men, I still would not know how to capture the presidential palace."

Rojas has other strengths. Colombia's economic health is good; the cost of living has remained stable for a year, and the country's major crop, coffee, selling at a satisfactory 62-c- a lb., should bring in a fat $500 million this year. Rojas' public works, depicted in pictures, maps and models at the exhibit he opened last week, are impressive: pipelines, airports, irrigation projects, and badly needed roads.

The Roman Catholic Church supports Rojas, and was pleased when he recently invited it to speed up its work of organizing labor unions. Washington's attitude, too, is friendly.

The overall result, most foreign observers believe, is that Rojas at present is not popular--but not hated. Some think that if he relaxed his harsher measures, notably the six-year-old state-of-siege under which he rules by decree, he could even win back the genuine popularity of his first hopeful months.

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