La Violencia

La Violencia (The Violence) is the ten-year (1948–58) period of civil war in Colombia, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party whose respective supporters fight most battles in the rural country.

La Violencia begins with the April 9, 1948 assassination of the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate who is very popular among mainstream Colombian society; his political murder provokes the Bogotazo rioting that lasts for ten hours and kills some 5,000 people.

An alternative historical perspective of La Violencia proposes 1946 as the start of civil-war violence, the year when the Conservatives return to government power; when rural-town police and political leaders encourage Conservative-party peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-party peasants, which provokes peasant-to-peasant violence throughout Colombia; a civil war for control of the country’s agricultural land.

The violence is estimated to have cost the lives of at least 200,000 people.

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