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La Violencia (1948-66)

The period known as "La Violencia" (The Violence) stands as one of the darkest and most complex chapters in modern Colombian history, a brutal sectarian conflict. "La Violencia", in which an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 partisans and others died, lasted for over a decade. La Violencia began as a street riot in Bogota (known as Bogotazo) that erupted in the wake of the assassination in 1948 of Liberal Party leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.

Rural violence, which had begun as early as 1946, raged out of control in much of the nation after Bogotazo. Except for the Bogotazo, La Violencia was overwhelmingly rural. It was also vicious, with atrocities freely committed by Conservative police or vigilantes as well as by Liberal guerrillas, who received no formal endorsement from party directorates but enjoyed widespread sympathy. In certain enclaves of PCC strength, self-defense forces arose that would develop into communist guerrilla bands.

Various authorities provide a variety of dates for this conflict, with civil strife starting in 1946 and 1947, and continuing until 1958, 1960, or 1966. The dates for this period are debated precisely because the violence was not a formal war but a metastasizing political and social bloodletting. Most historians trace its start to 1946 and its conclusion to the establishment of the National Front, though its embers continued to burn until 1966, directly giving rise to the new insurgencies that would define Colombia for the next half-century.

Generally speaking, the Violencia era is broken into four periods. Increasing political instability characterized Phase I (1946-April 9, 1948) as the Liberalparty under Alberto Lleras Camargo split its left and right-wing constituencies, losing power to a minority Conservative government. Phase II (Bogotazo-June 13, 1953) saw the bloodiest period of insurrection, with guerrilla warfare spreading in Colombia from the Llanos into Tolima. Both Liberal and Conservative campesinos organized into guerrilla self-defense groups. Phase III (June 13, 1953-May 10, 1957) coincides with the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship. The regime successfully initiated amnesty programs to quell the violence that had engulfed the country. Phase IV (August 1958-1966) encompasses the first two National Front governments of Liberal Lleras Camargo and Conservative Guillermo León Valencia. It witnessed an extensive collaborative effort between the United States and Colombia in developing thelatter's internal security apparatus.

While its most infamous flashpoint occurred in 1948, the conflict's origins were already simmering. The conflict was rooted in the profound, almost religious division between Colombia's two traditional political parties: the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. This was not a modern political disagreement; it was a 19th-century tribal identity.

• Conservatives: Championed a strong central government, close ties with the Catholic Church, and the protection of a traditional, hierarchical social order.
• Liberals: Advocated for federalism, the separation of church and state, and broader social modernization.

This division was the backdrop for the 1946 presidential election, which was a "precise reproduction" of the 1930 election in reverse. The highly popular Liberal Party tragically split its vote between its official candidate, Gabriel Turbay, and the charismatic populist dissident, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. This schism allowed the Conservative candidate, Mariano Ospina Pérez, to win the presidency with only a minority of the popular vote.

"Phase I" (1946-1948)

The Liberals’ fall from power because of a party split was an exact reproduction, with party roles reversed, of the Conservatives’ defeat in 1930. What came next also eerily resembled earlier events. Ospina, like Olaya previously, chose to ease the transition by forming a coalition government, and at the upper levels this approach at first worked reasonably well. In the backcountry, things were different; only this time reempowered Conservatives provoked trouble by setting out to avenge themselves on Liberals — and to make sure the Conservative Party would not again be cast into opposition.

Immediately, re-empowered local Conservative leaders set out to "avenge themselves on Liberals." This "Phase I" (1946-1948) was not mere political instability; it was the start of a "dirty war" in the countryside. Conservative police forces (known derogatorily as chulavitas) and partisan agents began to systematically dispossess Liberals of their land, force them to change their party registration, or flee. This was the "rural violence" that had already begun to rage long before the "Bogotazo." Outbreaks of violence spread through much of the country, so that what came to be called La Violencia (The Violence) actually began in 1946 rather than (as is sometimes said) on April 9, 1948, the day that the assassination of Gaitán set off the orgy of rioting known as the Bogotazo. The riots were not limited to Bogotá, but that is where the greatest destruction and loss of life occurred.

Assassination and Bogotazo (April 9, 1948)

The man at the center of the Liberal split, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was more than a politician; he was a social phenomenon. A fiery orator and a critic of both parties' "oligarchies," he electrified the urban poor and rural campesinos with promises of land reform and social justice. His slogan, "I am not a man, I am a people" (Yo no soy un hombre, soy un pueblo), captured the hopes of a disenfranchised nation. By 1948, he had reunified the Liberal Party under his command and was the clear favorite to win the 1950 presidency.

On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was shot and killed in broad daylight in downtown Bogotá by a 26-year-old man named Juan Roa Sierra. The official investigation identified Gaitán’s murderer as an unbalanced individual acting on his own, and this remains the most likely explanation, but the Liberal masses assumed that he had been struck down by a Conservative conspiracy.

The city exploded. The resulting riot, the "Bogotazo," was an orgy of destruction. An enraged mob immediately seized the assassin, Roa Sierra, and tore him to pieces, dragging his body to the presidential palace. They proceeded to loot stores owned by the oligarchy in the hope that the government would fall. The Liberal top command, which had shortly before withdrawn its members from Ospina’s coalition in protest over mounting carnage in the countryside, briefly shared the latter hope. Convinced the assassination was a Conservative plot to steal the presidency, the masses — incited by radio broadcasts from Gaitanista leaders — stormed and burned the capital. Streetcars, government buildings, churches, and the stores of the "oligarchy" were looted and set ablaze. For nearly 10 hours, the government ceased to exist.

President Ospina, barricaded in the palace, refused to resign. The Liberal Party's "top command," who had been protesting the rural carnage, initially saw the riot as a tool to force Ospina out. But as the riot spiraled into a potential social revolution, they backed down. Fearing a complete collapse of the state (or The army gradually regained control in Bogotá, and the Liberal leaders reluctantly rejoined the government for the sake of restoring order in time of crisis or, in the view of Gaitán’s hard-core followers, to form a united oligarchic front against the demands of the people. Fearing a communist takeover), they agreed to rejoin Ospina's "National Union" government to restore order. Violence did diminish in the immediate aftermath of April 9, but it built up again, particularly as the date for new elections drew near.

Before the presidential vote, the Liberals again left the government and at the last minute withdrew their candidate on the grounds that, in the climate of violence, no fair election was possible. The Conservative most hated by the Liberals, Gómez, thus won the presidency unopposed in 1950, but in such a way that most Liberals refused to regard him as a legitimate ruler.

Gómez himself, who took office in 1950, proposed a long-term solution to Colombia’s problems in the shape of a constitutional reform project that would have retained some democratic forms but showed obvious borrowing from Franco’s Spain. Making little headway against the violence, however, he steadily lost support even within his own party. On November 5, 1951, Gómez, because of his delicate health, temporarily ceded power to his minister of government, Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez. To Gaitán's followers, this was the ultimate betrayal. The "oligarchs" of both parties, they believed, had united to crush the will of the people.

Phase II: The Descent into Total War (1948-1953)

The "Bogotazo" was a catastrophic failure for the Gaitanista movement. It began as a spontaneous, city-wide explosion of grief and rage, but without leadership, it devolved into chaos. When the Liberal Party "oligarchs" chose to rejoin President Ospina's conservative government—a move they saw as necessary to prevent a total collapse of the state, but which the masses viewed as a profound betrayal—it signaled the end of any possible urban or political solution.

With the door to political power slammed shut, the violence did not end; it simply metastasized. It "raged out of control" by leaving the confines of the capital and pouring into the countryside, where partisan tensions were already at a breaking point. This marked the beginning of Phase II, the single bloodiest and most anarchic period of La Violencia.

This was not a conventional civil war with defined frontlines and uniformed armies. It was a decentralized, atomized, and terrifyingly intimate conflict. It became a war of town against town, village against village, and family against family, fought by a complex and overlapping host of armed actors. Party affiliation, once a simple political choice, was now an identity that carried an immediate death sentence. The conflict was fought by three main, loosely defined groups, none of which were monolithic.

The state apparatus was, for all intents and purposes, a weapon of the Conservative Party.

• The National Police: The police were no longer seen as neutral arbiters. They were purged of Liberal-leaning officers and restaffed with loyal Conservatives, many recruited from staunchly conservative regions. They became known by the derogatory term chulavitas (after a region in Boyacá). Their arrival in a Liberal town was not for "peacekeeping" but for "pacification"—a euphemism for the systematic arrest, torture, or execution of local Liberal leaders and the forced displacement of their supporters.
• The "Pájaros" (The Birds): The most infamous instruments of Conservative terror were these partisan armed groups. They were not an official army but death squads, often composed of hired assassins (sicarios) who were "on the books" of local Conservative politicians (gamonales), wealthy landowners, or even parish priests. They were called "Birds" because they would "fly in" to a town, often at night, assassinate their specific targets (a Liberal farmer, a town official, a teacher), and "fly out" before morning, leaving terror in their wake. Their work served a dual purpose: political cleansing and economic gain, as the land of their murdered or displaced victims was often seized by their patrons.

In response to this existential threat, Liberal campesinos (peasants) organized into "guerrilla self-defense groups." These were not initially revolutionary movements seeking to overthrow the state; they were reactive, desperate attempts by communities to protect themselves from extermination by the chulavitas and Pájaros.

• The Llanos Orientales: The "Llaneros" (plainsmen) of the Eastern Plains formed the most formidable and organized Liberal guerrillas. In this vast, open cattle country, they built mobile cavalry units that were highly effective against the government's conventional forces. Leaders like Guadalupe Salcedo became legends, commanding thousands of fighters in a war to restore Liberal honor.
• Tolima and the Mountains: In the dense, mountainous coffee-growing regions of Tolima and Antioquia, the fighting was different. It was a close-quarters, brutal war of ambush, reprisal, and assassination, where every mountain path could be a trap.

Critically, the official, "oligarchic" Liberal Party leadership in Bogotá was terrified of these armed groups. They had lost control of their rural base, and they feared these peasant guerrillas as much as they feared the Conservatives, seeing them as a threat to the social order. This complete disconnect between the party's urban elite and its rural fighters left the guerrillas without a central command or a unified political goal, splintering them into dozens of competing factions.

The Colombian Communist Party (PCC) had long been organizing peasants, particularly in land-conflict zones. During La Violencia, these organized communities activated their own "self-defense" networks.

• The "Independent Republics": In regions like Sumapaz (near Bogotá) and Marquetalia (in southern Tolima), the PCC established peasant enclaves. These were, in effect, territories where the Colombian state had no authority. They were autonomous communities that governed themselves and defended their land with arms.
• Allies of Convenience: The communist groups often allied with the Liberal guerrillas, as they shared a common enemy in the Conservative government. However, their goals were different. The Liberals wanted a return to the pre-1946 political order; the Communists wanted a fundamental social and land revolution. This ideological distinction would become critical in the decades to follow.

This phase of the war was marked not just by its death toll but by its "vicious" nature. The violence was performative and ritualistic, designed to inflict maximum terror and to dehumanize the "other." All sides committed atrocities, but the Conservative-backed paramilitaries became infamous for a "pedagogy of terror" involving symbolic mutilation of their victims' bodies. The "corte de corbata" (necktie cut), where a vertical slit was made in the victim's throat and their tongue was pulled through it to hang like a "necktie," was just one of many. Other horrific mutilations included the "corte de franela" ("flannel cut," decapitation or severing the head at the shoulders), the "corte de mica" ("monkey cut"), and bocachiquiar (stuffing the victim's mouth with grass or dirt).

This was psychological warfare. By disfiguring the corpse, the killers erased the victim's humanity, warned their families against even giving them a proper burial, and sent an unmistakable message to the survivors: flee or you are next. Rape of women, the killing of children, and the burning of entire villages became systematic tools of this genocidal conflict.

The violence escalated as the 1950 election approached. The Liberal Party, claiming no fair election was possible, withdrew its candidate. This allowed the man most hated by the Liberals, the arch-conservative Laureano Gómez, to win the presidency unopposed. Gómez, an admirer of Franco's Spain, saw the conflict in apocalyptic terms. He viewed Liberals as godless "communists" and immediately declared a state of siege, shut down the Liberal-dominated Congress, and imposed censorship. He proposed a constitutional reform to create a corporatist state modeled on fascist Spain, further solidifying the belief that he was an illegitimate dictator. His actions only poured gasoline on the fire, and the violence reached its zenith.

During Colombia's "La Violencia," the selection and assassination of targets was overwhelmingly driven by political partisanship. In the simplest terms, Conservatives were targeted by Liberals, and Liberals were targeted by Conservatives. However, this broad division conceals a systematic and often intimate process of identification and execution that tore Colombian society apart at the community level.

While the conflict affected all levels of society, the vast majority of victims and the primary targets of assassination fell into specific groups:

1. Rural Campesinos (Peasants): The violence was overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon. Peasants, who formed the base of support for both parties, were the primary victims. They were targeted for their family's traditional political allegiance, with the goal being to eliminate the "other side's" supporters from a given territory.
2. Local Political Leaders: These were high-value, strategic targets. Conservative Pájaros (death squads) were often specifically created to assassinate local Liberal politicians, town council members, judges, and community organizers. This was a form of "political cleansing" designed to decapitate the local opposition and consolidate power.
3. Community Organizers and "Social Leaders": Any individual who held influence in a town or village—a teacher, a labor leader, an influential farmer — was a target. Killing these figures sowed terror and broke the social cohesion of the community, making it easier to control.
4. Landowners: Wealthy landowners, particularly coffee hacienda owners, were targeted by armed groups on all sides. For Conservative Pájaros and police, this was often a way to seize valuable land from Liberal owners. For Liberal guerrillas, it was a way to exact "taxes" or "contributions" and to finance their operations, with assassination as the penalty for refusal.

The methods of identification were chillingly effective and ranged from official records to intimate betrayal. In the small, close-knit rural towns, political loyalty was a public fact, not a private opinion, making identification simple.

1. The Informant System ("Sapos") was the most crucial and terrifying tool of identification, known in Colombian Spanish as a sapo ("toad" or "snitch"). In this system, neighbors turned on neighbors. A local Conservative (or Liberal) would provide the armed group with a list of names, identifying which families in the village were loyal to the opposing party. This use of informants is why massacres were not random. Attackers would arrive at a remote farmhouse in the dead of night, knock on the door, and call the owner by name. This specific, personal knowledge—knowing the name and location of a target in an isolated area—was provided by sapos living within the same community.
2. Local Political Bosses (Gamonales), landowners, and even some clergy members were central to the targeting process. These local elites, who financed and directed the Pájaros (Conservative) or supported the guerrillas (Liberal), used their own knowledge of the local population to create "hit lists." The goal was often explicitly stated as "conservatizing" a Liberal-majority town, or vice-versa. This was a systematic campaign, and the lists of targets were drawn up by the local party leadership.
3. The Partisan Cédula (ID Card), the Colombian identity card, was not a neutral document. From its inception in the 1930s, the cédula was "historically linked to electoral disputes." The political parties themselves were deeply involved in issuing the cards to their own members to guarantee and control the vote. Because the cédula was tied to party registration, it could serve as a "passport to safety or a death warrant," as one historian noted. During a "search" by a police checkpoint or an armed patrol, the party affiliation on your card (or the known affiliation of your town of origin) was often enough to have you arrested or executed on the spot.
4. Visible Affiliation in this environment, where loyalty was visible. Political affiliation was inherited. If your father was a Liberal, you were a Liberal. Attackers didn't need to guess; they just needed to know your family name. Simply living in a town known to be a "Liberal stronghold" or a "Conservative bastion" was enough to make you a target when traveling or when an opposing armed group swept through.

In summary, a target was selected based on their political allegiance. They were then identified by their neighbors, their local political bosses, and sometimes by the very ID card in their pocket, turning a political disagreement into a systematic campaign of neighbor-against-neighbor extermination.

Phase III: The Military Dictatorship (1953-1957)

The situation became untenable. By 1953, the nation was ungovernable, and Gómez's autocratic project was alarming even to his own party. After a brief period ceding power due to "delicate health," Gómez resumed the presidency on June 13, 1953. Hours later, he was overthrown in a military coup—the first in Colombia in a century — led by the popular Army commander, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.

The coup was widely celebrated. It was backed by moderate Conservatives (the "Ospinista" wing) and met with relief by Liberals, all of whom saw Rojas as a savior from both Gómez's fascism and the rural anarchy. Repressed Liberals and all but hard-core followers of Gómez greeted the 1953 coup with sighs of relief. A few Liberals joined the government, and many Liberal guerrillas accepted Rojas’s offers of amnesty; for a time, the level of political violence subsided.

This marked the start of Phase III. Rojas Pinilla's regime successfully initiated amnesty programs. He promised "No blood, no political leanings... only peace, justice, and work." Thousands of Liberal guerrillas in the Llanos demobilized. For a brief moment, the violence subsided dramatically. However, Rojas made no serious effort to win over the guerrillas, and eventually violence picked up again; it was also changing. The original political conflict between Liberals and Conservatives became increasingly blurred by elements of economic competition and sheer banditry, using the party labels as banners to cover actions carried out for material gain.

American military assistance followed the needs of the Colombian military government. The U.S. provided significant support to the Colombian armed forces during the mid-1950s, even though some people criticized President Eisenhower's administration for supporting an undemocratic military regime in Colombia.

By offering amnesty to any guerrilla who would disarm, the new president initially held out a real incentive to end the violence. He also pledged to conduct a nonpartisan administration, which provided an added inducement to return to a peaceful society. Coupled with war weariness these steps resulted in reduced violence until 1956. Then the economy, which had been quite vigorous because of high coffee prices, took a downturn as the coffee market collapsed.

Rojas Pinilla made progress in reducing rural warfare; but by 1957 his regime had become so arbitrary and corrupt that he was put out of office by the oligarchy and the military establishment. When the president tampered with the electoral process in 1957, a military junta deposed him. The former in particular feared Rojas' efforts to organize a mass anti-oligarchical party. By then it was also apparent that the general, aside from being partisan, was building a political organization in the manner of Juan Peron of Argentina. Thus violence rose again and the public was increasingly disaffected by authoritarian rule.

Rojas tried brute force against those who failed to accept his overtures, but without much success, and so the death toll kept climbing. By 1957 it had reached a cumulative total on the order of 175,000, in a population that had grown by 40 percent since 1946 to more than 14 million. Meanwhile, a string of Rojas’s arbitrary actions—together with allegations of personal enrichment—eroded his support among both Liberals and Ospinista Conservatives.

Rojas began to develop his own populist, dictatorial ambitions. He created a "Third Force" (Acción Popular) to bypass the traditional parties, enriched himself and his family, and brutally suppressed dissent, most notably by censoring and shutting down the iconic Liberal newspaper El Tiempo. Crucially, while he made peace with the Liberal guerrillas, he turned the army against the Communist self-defense groups, launching a major military offensive (the "War of Villarrica"). This move convinced the communists of what they already knew, that the state could never be trusted, forcing them back into the mountains and cementing their role as a permanent insurgency.

Phase IV: The National Front & Shifting Violence (1958-1966)

By 1957, Rojas Pinilla had alienated everyone. In a stunning turn of events, the Liberal and Conservative elites—mortal enemies for a century—realized the military dictatorship was a greater threat to their existence than each other. They met in Spain to sign the Pact of Sitges, agreeing to form a "National Front" (Frente Nacional). This pact led to a "paro cívico" (civic strike) by bankers, students, workers, and business leaders that forced Rojas to resign on May 10, 1957.

Phase IV (1958-1966) began with this new government. The National Front was a power-sharing arrangement:

• The presidency would alternate between a Liberal and a Conservative every four years (starting with the Liberal Alberto Lleras Camargo). All government jobs and congressional seats would be split 50/50 between the two parties.

This new system successfully ended La Violencia as it was originally defined. The war between Liberals and Conservatives stopped. However, the National Front was fundamentally anti-democratic. It locked all other political movements out of power. The "extensive collaborative effort between the United States and Colombia" in this period, primarily through the Plan LASO (Latin American Security Operation), was a new counter-insurgency strategy. It was no longer about fighting Conservatives; it was about hunting down the bandoleros (bandits) that La Violencia had spawned and, more importantly, the new "communist" threat.

In 1964, the Colombian military, using U.S.-supplied equipment and counter-insurgency tactics, launched a massive attack on the "Independent Republic of Marquetalia," the last major stronghold of the Communist self-defense groups who had been betrayed by Rojas. The survivors of that bombing, led by Manuel Marulanda Vélez ("Tirofijo"), fled into the jungle and, two years later, formally established the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), inspired by the Cuban Revolution, was founded around the same time.

Thus, La Violencia did not truly end in 1966. It simply transformed. The sectarian hatred between Liberals and Conservatives had burned itself out, only to be replaced by a new, more ideological, and equally brutal 50-year conflict.