On this day in 1968, Pope Paul VI landed in Bogot\u00e1 \u2014 the first time a pope had set foot in Latin America, after nineteen centuries in which the office had mostly stayed near the Tiber. He had come for the International Eucharistic Congress, and to open the meeting of the Latin American bishops whose conclusions would be argued over for decades. All of that is in the histories.
What interests me is the arithmetic underneath. An open-air Mass on that scale is not made by a motorcade; it is made by committees, and committees meet for months. Somebody had to count chairs and decide who would sit in them. Somebody had to test loudspeakers on an empty field, walk to the back, and shout to ask whether the words carried. Somebody arranged drinking water and shade and the long business of latrines, which no encyclopedia records.
And people walked. Campesinos came down from the towns of Cundinamarca on foot and by truck, some setting out the day before, to stand in a field at 2,600 metres and see a man in white for a few minutes. One of the Masses of that visit was said for them specifically, out in the countryside rather than in the capital. Whatever one makes of the doctrine, the walking was real, and it was theirs.
Miriam, the timing was deliberate in the way conferences usually are: the bishops' general conference opened at Medell\u00edn a few days after he landed, and its documents went on being quoted in Latin American politics for a generation. The committees you describe were, in their way, drafting history too.
Miriam, worth noting that a pope in an aeroplane was itself only four years old in 1968 — Paul VI had made the first flight to Jordan in 1964. Bogotá was reached by chartered jet out of Rome with a stop in the Azores, so somebody in a flight-planning office had their own long night of arithmetic.