La Violencia

La Violencia (, The Violence) was the ten-year (1948–58) period of civil war in Colombia, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party whose respective supporters fought most battles in the rural country. La Violencia began with the 9 April 1948 assassination of the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate who was very popular among mainstream Colombian society; his political murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting that lasted for ten hours and killed some 5,000 people. An alternative historical perspective of La Violencia proposed 1946 as the start of civil-war violence, the year when the Conservatives returned to government power; when rural-town police and political leaders encouraged Conservative-party peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-party peasants, which provoked 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.