Barco is credited with beginning the process of privatising state-owned companies which has continued under his much

Barco is credited with beginning the process of privatising state-owned companies, which has continued under his much younger successors, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Samper. He also saw Colombia safely through the debt crisis that afflicted the rest of the continent, ensuring that it never defaulted on its payments or had to seek rescheduling of its obligations.Barco was frequently distracted from these tasks by the need to deal with the endemic guerrilla warfare that dated back to the period of La Violencia. Austere and aloof, he hated making speeches and taking part in public debates, and was equally uncomfortable with the bureaucratic spoils system that had helped to keep the lid on political rivalries since La Violencia came to an end 30 years earlier. He preferred to surround himself with young technocrats, promoting several of them to ministerial posts when they were still in their twenties.They served him well as he struggled to wean the Liberal Party away from its traditionally interventionist, protectionist ways and open up the Colombian economy to the free- market influences that were sweeping the continent in the late 1980s.

Thereafter he held a succession of senior ministerial and diplomatic appointments (he was Ambassador in London in 1961-62 and 1990-92) in the course of a long career in public life, culminating in his election as President of the Republic in 1986, with a record five million votes.His landslide victory owed nothing to the rousing oratory or skills in backroom deal- making that are the normal qualifications for political success in Colombia. By 1945 he was acting minister of posts and telegraphs, and three years later he was elected to the lower house of congress in Bogot. Within two years he had entered active politics as a Liberal councillor in the nearby town of Durania. He was expected to take his place in the social and political life of his home town, Ccuta, but to his family’s horror he announced that during his absence he had become a Liberal. This was at a time when party loyalties were set in stone in the Colombian provinces, and good Conservatives believed Liberals were in league with the Devil. His grandfather, General Virgilio Barco, never recovered from the shock.Despite his natural shyness and dislike of confrontation, young Virgilio stuck to his new-found political beliefs. His family had made their money in oil, and, like many young men of his class, he was sent abroad to study, returning at the age of 22 with a degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Colombia is one of the very few Latin American countries where military interventions have been the exception rather than the rule throughout its history, and where two-party elections have usually taken place on schedule. But the forces of anarchy are always threatening to break loose, as Barco learnt as a young man: when he entered politics in the mid-1940s the country was plunging into a decade of undeclared civil war, known simply as “La Violencia”, in which the rival Liberal and Conservative parties took up arms against each other and hundreds of thousands of people died.Barco was born in 1921 into a wealthy Conservative family in the department of Norte de Santander, on the Venezuelan frontier. They could expect much harsher treatment from the courts there than in Colombia, as they were held responsible for supplying most of the cocaine that reached the streets of American cities. Until Barco acted the power of the cocaine cartels had been growing unchecked in Colombia, and the psychopathic Escobar had come to believe that he could do much as he liked.Barco’s firm response was characteristic of a man who believed in the rule of law, in a country where it has needed courage to defend such principles.