La Violencia: A Visual History

La Violencia (1948-1958) was a period of civil war between Colombia's Liberal and Conservative parties, fought mainly by peasants in the coffee highlands and llanos. It exploded on 9 April 1948 when the Liberal populist Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot in Bogota and the city was sacked in the Bogotazo, and it deepened under Conservative president Laureano Gomez, whose police and 'pajaros' hitmen attacked Liberal villages while Liberal and communist guerrillas retaliated; killings were marked by mutilation. General Rojas Pinilla's coup in 1953 and amnesty reduced the violence, and the National Front pact of 1958, alternating the presidency between the parties for 16 years, formally ended it. About 200,000 died and 2 million were displaced; the surviving communist self-defence groups became the FARC.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

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Estimated deaths in La Violencia by year

Timeline of the La Violencia

1. 1946
   Conservatives return to power; rural violence begins
2. 1948
   Gaitan assassinated; Bogotazo9 April.
3. 1950
   Laureano Gomez president
4. 1953
   Rojas Pinilla's coup; amnesty
5. 1957
   Rojas ousted; Salcedo killed
6. 1958
   National Front begins
7. 1964
   Marquetalia attacked; FARC founded

The Bogotazo

Colombia's two parties had fought civil wars since the nineteenth century; the Conservative return to power in 1946 brought partisan police violence in the countryside. Gaitan, a Liberal who spoke for the poor and seemed certain to be president, was shot at lunchtime on 9 April 1948 as the Pan-American conference met in Bogota; the crowd lynched his killer and burned the city centre for days, with some 3,000 dead. Fidel Castro was among the students in town. The country's rural war followed.

Gomez and the killing fields

Laureano Gomez, elected unopposed in 1950 after the Liberals abstained, was an admirer of Franco who declared the Liberal party subversive; Conservative police and pajaros massacred Liberal peasants in Boyaca, Tolima, Valle and the coffee zones, and Liberal guerrillas in the eastern llanos under Guadalupe Salcedo fought back with 20,000 men. Killings featured 'cuts' with distinctive names, the corte de corbata among them; whole villages were emptied and land seized. The Church, mostly Conservative, blessed one side.

Rojas Pinilla and the National Front

General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power in June 1953 with both parties' relief, amnestied the llanos guerrillas (Salcedo was murdered after surrendering, in 1957) and reduced the killing, though violence in Tolima and against communist enclaves continued and his own regime turned repressive. The parties united to oust him in 1957 and agreed the National Front: alternating presidents and equal division of offices from 1958 to 1974. It ended the partisan war but excluded everyone else; the communist 'independent republics' like Marquetalia were attacked in 1964 and their survivors founded the FARC.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Dutch Empire (1602 to 1975)

Wars of the same era and region

• Colombian conflict (1964 to present)
• Thousand Days' War (1899 to 1902)
• Colombian War of Independence (1810 to 1825)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939)
• Chaco War (1932 to 1935)

8 surprising things about the La Violencia

1. Gaitan's assassin Juan Roa Sierra was killed by the crowd within minutes; theories about who sent him have never been settled.
2. Fidel Castro, then a 21-year-old student, was in Bogota for a youth congress and joined the rioting.
3. The Bogotazo destroyed much of the capital's centre and derailed the conference that founded the Organisation of American States.
4. The killers' 'cuts' were so notorious that Colombian sociologists catalogued them in the classic study La Violencia en Colombia (1962).
5. Rojas Pinilla, the coup leader, later founded the ANAPO party and lost the 1970 election amid fraud claims, spawning the M-19 guerrillas.
6. The National Front pact was approved by plebiscite with 95 percent in favour.
7. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's early work, including No One Writes to the Colonel, is shaped by La Violencia.
8. The FARC's founder Manuel Marulanda began as a Liberal guerrilla in Tolima during La Violencia.

Sources

• La Violencia Wikipedia
• Colombia: La Violencia Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Jorge Eliecer Gaitan Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Mary Roldan, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia (2002) Duke University Press

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