“Football first came to Colombia via British sailors in the Caribbean Sea port city of Barranquilla. Football remained an amateur affair with no national league for decades, and with the game having little presence in the interior of the country. This was primarily because of the lack of transportation infrastructure in a nation which had some formidable barriers, namely steep mountain ranges and wide rivers. Coffee growing as an industry changed that, providing the wealth that allowed for transportation improvements, and by the 1930s and 1940s, football had spread throughout Colombia. The wealth also brought into focus the economic disparity between the privileged few and the teeming masses of the underclass. In 1948, at the same time that a professional league was about to begin play in Colombia, there was widespread civil unrest following the still-unsolved assassination of the presedential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who was mayor of Bogatá. Gaitán was a threat to the entrenched oligarchy…his most famous pronouncement was ‘The people are superior to their leaders’.” (billsportsmaps)