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President Virgilio Barco of Colombia
"Colombia" now suggests drugs and cartels, and its president is under siege. It was not always thus. Traditionally, Bogota was "the Athens of America". It had a Jeffersonian intellectual elite of which the mouthpiece was the newspaper EL TIEMPO. The founding generation of Stanford's Latin American program had close ties with its leaders, as was evident in the display of photographs at Bolivar House on the occasion of our June 1996 50th anniversary reunion. Among those featured were Presidents Eduardo Santos and Lleras Camargo, and the writer Luis Enrique Osorio. Among the students in the program, whose residence was La Casa Espanola, we fondly remember Carolina Isakson, who wrote us a touching letter regretting that the invitation to the reunion arrived too late for her to attend. She recalled that she and her husband, Virgilio Barco, then a graduate student in economics at Harvard and later President of Colombia, sent us clippings for our monthly analysis, the HISPANIC AMERICAN REPORT. After they settled in Bogota and he became a public leader, they were most gracious to us.
What she did not mention in her letter was the tragedy which had befallen them. We learned it from EL TIEMPO journalist, Maria Teresa Ronderos, who is spending a year at Stanford as a Knight Fellow. Virgilio was suffering from cancer and Parkinson's disease, and Carolina was devoting her life to taking care of him. I wrote her a letter expressing our sorrow. Now Virgilio has died, one of the most respected presidents Colombia has ever had. His state funeral, shown on television throughout Latin America and in Spain, was a remarkable tribute to him. We do not know how to tell Carolina how sad we are.
Ronald Hilton.
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