1950-60년대 순천의 지역정치와 6·8부정선거 규탄운동

Abstract

This study examined the aspects and features of the movement to denounce the June 8 fraudulent election in Suncheon, Jeollanamdo. The movement aimed at breaking President Park Chung-hee’s long hold on power. As the local research of the pro-democracy movement tends to be limited to the April 19 Revolution, this paper focuses on viewing the condemnation movement to the June 8 election in the context of regional politics in Suncheon in the 1960s. Local politics usually consist of ‘the regional election politics’ which includes the royal families and alumni of the same schools and towns, and is operated during election campaigns and voting periods and ‘the regional maintenance politics’ in which influential people in the region put their names on the opposition parties, social organizations and government organizations. The way the latter group entered the parliamentary elections utilizing the former as their background has to be investigated in order to find out the regional actuality of the movement. In 1967, the June 8 general election in Suncheon was a clash between Cho Yeon-ha and Kim Woo-kyung, who emerged as new political forces in the region. In the 1960s, Cho Yeon-ha was a politician who represented the regional opposition party in his 40s and Kim Woo-kyung, a former soldier, rose as a politician in his 30s from the May 16 coup. Contrary to the elections in the 1950, dominated by local leaders who grew up in colonial Joseon, regional political forces faced the generational change from the June 8 election in 1967. However, the election was also a rigged election due to the government and the ruling party seeking to secure a constitutional amendment, which led local opposition parties and high school students to the protest denouncing the fraudulent election. High school students in downtown Suncheon collectively aroused their sense of resistance and political consciousness through the process of planning and leading the April 27 protest in 1960 and the April 16 demonstration in 1965. The opposition parties in Suncheon, on the other hand, began to lead the anti-dictatorship struggle in the region with denouncing movement as a momentum. In this process, Suncheon more or less overcame the trauma of the Yeosu-Suncheon incident and made a progress to become a dynamic society.