Public Outrage Follows Slaying of a Candidate : Colombia: Assassination of a third presidential hopeful is seen as an official failure to control terrorism.

The assassination of presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro Leongomez on a commercial airline flight triggered a barrage of outrage Friday over the Colombian government’s failure to control terrorist violence.

The Thursday slaying was the latest in a long series of so-called “magnicides” and other terrorist killings. Although it was not clear whether Pizarro’s death was plotted by political extremists or ruthless drug lords at war with Colombia’s leadership, there was little doubt that the assassination was new evidence of the Colombian government’s inability to maintain public security.

“The Greeks called that anarchy--no government,” presidential candidate Alvaro Gomez, a veteran leader of the opposition Social Conservative Party, said in an interview.

Gomez publicly proposed Friday the creation of a “triumvirate” to administer public security. He said that President Virgilio Barco Vargas should appoint the panel of three--whether civilian or military “does not matter,” he said--and delegate all security responsibilities to it.

“The primary objective of this is to re-establish the possibility of living,” Gomez said. “The country is dying.”

The government quickly rejected the proposal, as it did another that presidential elections, scheduled for May 27, be postponed.

Former President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, a member of President Barco’s Liberal Party, called for a thorough reorganization of the country’s security forces. Pizarro’s brother, social scientist Eduardo Pizarro, agreed.

“It seems to me that there is an absence of political control over those institutions that is letting elements of the state become accomplices of deplorable occurences,” he said.

Leaders of Carlos Pizarro’s leftist political movement, M-19, until recently a guerrilla army, met with the National Security Council and demanded more effective security for its members. They also pressed for full clarification of who is responsible for Pizarro’s death.

“That is the same thing the government wants,” said Minister of Government Horacio Serpa.

The assassin who shot Pizarro aboard the airborne domestic jetliner was identified as Gerardo Gutierrez Uribe, 21. He was killed by one of several plainclothes agents guarding Pizarro aboard the Avianca Boeing 727.

Police detained at least four men in the investigation but gave no indication of whom the plot’s masterminds might have been, according to press reports.

Atty. Gen. Alfonso Gomez ordered an investigation by police specialists of Bogota’s airport security and of how Gutierrez smuggled a weapon onto the plane.

Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, chief of investigative police, said he did not rule out complicity by officers or airport employees.

On Bogota’s central Plaza Bolivar, thousands of mourners lined up Friday to view Pizarro’s body, which lay in state in the national Senate building. The funeral is scheduled for today.

Pizarro, 38, was the top leader of M-19--the April 19 Movement--a guerrilla army that signed a peace treaty with the government and became a political party in March. He was the third candidate for the presidency to be assassinated.

Luis Carlos Galan, a candidate of the Liberal Party, was killed at a political rally Aug. 18, and Bernardo Jaramillo of the Marxist-oriented Patriotic Union was shot down at the airport March 22. All three were members of a new political generation who advocated deep changes in the country’s ailing democratic system.

Officials have accused cocaine traffickers of ordering the assassinations of Galan and Jaramillo. The day Galan was killed, the government began a blitz against the powerful drug lords, arresting hundreds of people and seizing homes, offices, ranches and other properties.

Traffickers calling themselves “the Extraditables” responded with a declaration of “total war” against the government and the country’s influential establishment. Since then, traffickers have been blamed for the deaths of more than 200 people, including politicians, newspaper employees, judges and police officers.

Meanwhile, the government has extradited 15 Colombians to the United States for trial on drug-trafficking charges.

In a statement Friday, the Extraditables denied they had any part in the assassination of Pizarro, calling him a “friend of dialogue with us, enemy of extradition.”

The statement said an end to extradition was no longer the main objective of the traffickers. That issue has been displaced by “tortures, killings and disappearances of our comrades” captured by police, the statement said.

The Extraditables also denied any involvement in a reported plot to kill Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, Colombia’s top Roman Catholic official. The cardinal’s office said that men disguised as security officials and planning to kill Lopez Trujillo fled when they were discovered at his office Thursday.

The man most likely to be Colombia’s next president rejected any peace negotiations with the traffickers. Candidate Cesar Gaviria of the ruling Liberal Party vowed Friday to take firm action against narcotics traffickers and other violent groups.

“You don’t face terrorism with concessions,” Gaviria said in a televised address. “We will fight against it until we defeat it.”

He called Colombia’s violence a “national tragedy,” and decried a “climate of corruption, immorality and indifference to crime that contributed so much to the rise of the great evils that are bloodying the country.”

Gaviria said the goal of terrorist violence is to block democratic change, renovation and reform.

NEXT STEP

Elections on May 27 will pick a new man to head Colombia’s government and, in effect, lead that nation’s war against drug traffickers. If conventional wisdom prevails, that man will be Cesar Gaviria, 43, who is closely identified with the policies of outgoing President Virgilio Barco Vargas. Gaviria is the candidate of the Liberals, one of two traditional Colombian parties that date from the last century. The Liberals, when united as they are in this campaign, enjoy a natural majority in the country. Gaviria’s main challenger is Rodrigo Lloreda of the traditional Conservatives, who now call themselves the Social Conservative Party. Another Conservative leader, Alvaro Gomez, is running on a separate ticket. The winner of May’s balloting will take office in August.