La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year wave of civil conflict and unrest in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, mainly fought in the countryside.
La Violencia is considered to have begun with the assassination on 9 April 1948 of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate and frontrunner for the 1949 November election. His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting, which lasted ten hours and resulted in around 5,000 casualties. An alternative historiography proposes the Conservative Party's return to power following the election of 1946 to be the cause. Rural town police and political leaders encouraged Conservative-supporting peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-supporting peasants, which provoked peasant-to-peasant violence throughout Colombia.
La Violencia is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people, almost 1 in 50 Colombians.
Development
The La Violencia conflict took place between the Military Forces of Colombia and the National Police of Colombia supported by Colombian Conservative Party paramilitary groups on one side, and paramilitary and guerrilla groups aligned with the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Communist Party on the other side.
The conflict caused millions of people to abandon their homes and property. Media and news services failed to cover events accurately for fear of revenge attacks. The lack of public order and civil authority prevented victims from laying charges against perpetrators. Documented evidence from these years is rare and fragmented.
The majority of the population at the time was Catholic. During the conflict there were press reports that Catholic Church authorities supported the Conservative Party. Several priests were accused of openly encouraging the murder of the political opposition during Catholic mass, including the Santa Rosa de Osos Bishop Miguel Ángel Builes, although this is unproven. No formal charges were ever presented and no official statements were made by the Holy See or the Board of Bishops. These events were recounted in the 1950 book Lo que el cielo no perdona ("What heaven doesn't forgive"), written by the secretary to Builes, Father Fidel Blandon Berrio. Eduardo Caballero Calderón also recounted these events in his 1952 book El Cristo de Espaldas ("Backwards Christ"). After releasing his book, Blandon resigned from his position and assumed a false identity as Antonio Gutiérrez. However, he was eventually identified and legally charged and prosecuted for libel by the Conservative Party.
As a result of La Violencia there were no liberal candidates for the presidency, congress, or any public corporations in the 1949 presidential elections. The press accused the government of pogroms against the opposition. Censorship and reprisals were common against journalists, writers, and directors of news services; in consequence many media figures left the country. Jorge Zalamea, director of Critica magazine, fled to Buenos Aires; Luis Vidales to Chile; Antonio Garcia to La Paz, and Gerardo Molina to Paris.
Timeline
Before 1946
Since the 1920s, Conservatives had held the majority of governmental power, a position it would continue to occupy until the 2002 election of Alvaro Uribe. Even when Liberals gained control of the government in the 1930s, there was tension and even violent outbursts between peasants and landowners, as well as workers and industry owners. The number of yearly deaths from conflict, however, were far less than those estimated to have occurred during La Violencia.
1946–1947
In the 1946 election, Mariano Ospina Pérez of the Conservative party won the presidency, largely because the Liberal votes were split between two Liberal candidates.
Mariano Ospina Pérez and the Conservative party Government used the police and army to repress the Liberal party. Their response was to fight back with violent protests. This led to an increasing amount of pressure within political and civil society. Some consider La Violencia having started at this point because the Conservative government began increasing the backlash against Liberal protests and small rebel groups. There were an estimated 14,000 deaths in 1947 due to this violence.
1948
On April 9, 1948, Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated by Juan Roa Sierra on the street in Bogotá, via three shots from a revolver. Gaitán was a popular candidate and would have been the likely winner of the 1950 election. This began the Bogotazo as angry mobs beat Roa Sierra to death and headed to the presidential palace with the intent of killing President Ospina Pérez. The murder of Gaitán and subsequent rioting sparked other popular uprisings throughout the country. Because of the Liberal nature of these revolts, the police and military, who had been largely neutral before, either defected or became aligned with the Conservative government.
1949–1953
Initially, Liberal leaders in Colombia worked with the Conservative government to stop uprisings and root out Communists. In May 1949, Liberal leaders resigned from their positions within the Ospina Pérez administration, due to the widespread persecution of Liberals throughout the country. Attempting to end La Violencia, the Liberals, who had majority control of Congress, began impeachment proceedings against President Ospina Pérez on November 9, 1949. In response, Ospina Pérez dissolved the Congress, creating a Conservative dictatorship. The Liberal Party decided to stage a military coup, and it was planned for November 25, 1949. However, many of the party members decided it was not a good idea and called it off. One conspirator, Air Force Captain Alfredo Silva, in the city of Villavicencio, had not been notified of the abandonment of the plan and carried it out. After rallying the Villavicencio garrison, he disarmed the police and took control of the city. Silva proceeded to urge others in the region to join the revolt, and Eliseo Velásquez, a peasant guerrilla leader, took Puerto López on December 1, 1949, as well as capturing other villages in the Meta River region. In this time, Silva was caught and arrested by troops from Bogotá coming to take back control of Villavicencio.
In 1950, Laureano Gómez was elected president of Colombia, but it was a largely manipulated election, leading Gómez to become the new Conservative dictator.
After Alfredo Silva's disappearance, Velásquez assumed power of the forces in the Eastern Plains that, by April 1950, included seven rebel zones with hundreds of guerrillas known as the "cowboys". While in command of the forces, Velásquez suffered from a superiority complex, leading him to commit abuses including body mutilation of those killed. Without sufficient arms, during the first major offensive of the Conservative army, the Liberal forces took major losses and confidence in Velásquez was lost. New populist leaders took control of the different groups of rebels and eventually came together to impose a 10% tax on wealthy landowners in the region. This tax created divisions from the wealthy Liberals and the Conservative government used them to recruit counter guerrillas. The Conservative army then increased its offensive attacks; committing atrocities along the way, they burned entire villages, slaughtered animals, and massacred suspected rebels, as well as set up a blockade of the region. The rebels were able to combat the offensive with small, covert, attacks to capture outposts and supplies. By June 1951, the government agreed to a truce with the guerrilla forces and they temporarily lifted the blockade.
A few months after the truce, larger army units were sent to the Eastern Plains to end the Liberal revolt, but they were still unsuccessful. In this time, the Liberal leadership in Bogotá realized the Conservatives were not giving up power any time soon, and they wanted to organise a national revolt. In December 1951 and January 1952, Alfonso López Pumarejo, the former Colombian president and leader of the Liberal Party, made visits to the Eastern Plains to renew his alliance with the "cowboys". When López Pumarejo returned to Bogotá he issued declarations stating that the guerrillas were not criminals but were simply fighting for freedom, and in response the Conservative dictatorship shut down the newspapers and imposed strict censorship. 1952 passed with only small skirmishes and no organised guerrilla leader, but by June 1953, Guadalupe Salcedo had assumed command.
In 1952 the future revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then an unknown young man traveling through South America, briefly visited Bogotá. In a letter he wrote to his mother on July 6, 1952, later published in "The Motorcycle Diaries", Guevara noted that "There is more repression of individual freedom here than in any country we've been to, the police patrol the streets carrying rifles and demand your papers every few minutes". He went on to describe the atmosphere as "tense" and "suffocating", even hypothesizing that "a revolution may be brewing".
In other parts of Colombia, different rebel groups had formed in throughout 1950; they formed in Antioquia, Tolima, Sumapaz, and the Middle Magdalena Valley. On January 1, 1953, these groups came together to launch an attack against the Palanquero Air Base, with the hope of using the jet planes to bomb Bogotá and force the resignation of the Conservative dictatorship. The attack relied entirely on surprise to be successful, but the rebels were spotted by the sentry posts and were quickly hit with machine gun fire. The attempt was a failure, however it did incite fear into Bogotá elites.
Conclusion
Most of the armed groups (called guerrillas liberales, a pejorative term) were demobilised during the amnesty declared by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla after he took power on 13 June 1953. The most prominent Guerrilla leaders, Guadalupe Salcedo and Juan de la Cruz Varela, signed the 1953 agreement.
Some of the guerrilleros did not surrender to the government and organized into criminal bands or bandoleros, which caused intense military operations against them in 1954. One of them, the guerrillero leader Tirofijo, had changed his political and ideological inclinations from being a Liberal to supporting the Communists during this period, and eventually he became the founder of the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC.
Rojas was removed from power on 10 May 1957. Civilian rule was restored after moderate Conservatives and Liberals, with the support of dissident sectors of the military, agreed to unite under a bipartisan coalition known as the National Front and the government of Alberto Lleras Camargo and which included a system of alternating the president and power-sharing both in cabinets and public offices.
In 1958, Lleras Camargo ordered the creation of the Commission for the Investigation of the Causes of "La Violencia". The commission was headed by the Bishop Germán Guzmán Campos.
The last bandolero leaders were killed in combat against the army. Jacinto Cruz Usma, alias Sangrenegra (Blackblood), died in April 1964 and Efraín Gonzáles in June 1965.
Impacts
Humanitarian
Due to incomplete or non-existent statistical records, exact measurement of La Violencia's humanitarian consequences is impossible. Scholars, however, estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people died; 600,000 to 800,000 were injured; and almost one million people were displaced. La Violencia directly or indirectly affected 20 percent of the population.
La Violencia did not acquire its name simply because of the number of people it affected; it was the manner in which many of the killings, maimings, and dismemberings were done. Certain death and torture techniques became so commonplace that they were given names—for example, picar para tamal, which involved slowly cutting up a living person's body; or bocachiquiar, where hundreds of small punctures were made until the victim slowly bled to death. Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs for the United States National Security Council and current President of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, Norman A. Bailey describes the atrocities succinctly: "Ingenious forms of quartering and beheading were invented and given such names as the 'corte de mica', 'corte de corbata' (aka Colombian necktie), and so on. Crucifixions and hangings were commonplace, political 'prisoners' were thrown from airplanes in flight, infants were bayoneted, schoolgirls, some as young as eight years old, were raped en masse, unborn infants were removed by crude Caesarian section and replaced by roosters, ears were cut off, scalps removed, and so on." While scholars, historians, and analysts have all debated the source of this era of unrest, they have yet to formulate a widely accepted explanation for why it escalated to the notable level it did.