I am not a man, I am a people. An analysis of the political experience of the gaitanista movement

The following work aims to analyze the emergence of the Gaitanista Movement as a political fact, by virtue of reflecting on the configuration of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan as leader of the movement and his relationship with the Colombian people. Gaitan is thought as a populist leader based on the thesis formulated by Ernesto Laclau and his horizon of post-marxist/post-structuralist analysis, based on the construction of political identities from the discursive (Laclau, 1987; Laclau, 2003, Laclau and Mouffe 2004; Laclau, 2008), thesis that has generated strong reactions for and against from the academic world.From this, the context of the emergence of the Gaitanista Movement will be analyzed, starting from the transformation of particular demands in an equivalential chain that will be transformed into the unique identity of the people under the leadership of the liberal caudillo. The testimonies of the Gaitanist experience compiled by Arturo Alape in his work El Bogotazo, Memorias del olvido, written in 1984, will be an enormous contribution to this task. This memory set is made up of the experiences of the protagonists of those years, constituting a rich material for analysis.