La Violencia

La Violencia
La Violencia
Part of the Colombian Civil Wars and the Cold War
	Tram on fire in front of the Congress during the Bogotazo
Date	9 April 1948 – 1958
Location	Colombia
Resulted in	Stalemate Creation of the National Front; Colombian conflict;
Parties
Colombian Conservative Party Conservative party paramilitary groups Pájaros; Chulavitas; ;	Colombian Liberal Party and allied militias Liberal party paramilitary groups; Colombian Communist Party Grupos de Autodefensas Campesinas; ;
Lead figures
	Mariano Ospina Pérez; Laureano Gómez Castro; General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla; Junta Militar; Alberto Lleras Camargo; Guillermo Leon Valencia; León Maria Lozano "El Condor"; Jair Giraldo; Efraín González Téllez; Guadalupe Salcedo; Dumar Aljure; Gerardo Loaiza; Saúl Fajardo; Eduardo Franco Isaza; Juan de La Cruz Varela; Juan de Jesús Franco; Jacinto Cruz Usma "Sangrenegra"; Teófilo Rojas Varón "Chispas"; Jacobo Prias Alape; Manuel Marulanda; Ciro Trujillo Castaño; Alfonso Castañeda;
Casualties and losses
2,900 soldiers and 1,800 police officers dead (1948–57); 3,000–5,000 conservative paramilitaries dead	15,000 rebels dead (1948–58)
	200,000 civilians killed (1947–60)

La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, fought mainly in the countryside.^[1]^[2]^[3]

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.^[4] His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting, which lasted ten hours and resulted in around 5,000 casualties.^[4] An alternative historiography proposes the Conservative Party's return to power following the election of 1946 to be the cause.^[4] 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.^[4]

La Violencia is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people, almost 1 in 50 Colombians.^[5]^[6]^[7]

^ Stokes, Doug (2005). America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia. Zed Books. ISBN 1-84277-547-2. Azcarate quotes a figure of 300,000 dead between 1948–1959...^{[page needed]}
^ Gutierrez, Pedro Ruz (31 October 1999). "Bullets, Bloodshed And Ballots". Orlando Sentinel. Archived from the original on 2016-08-15. Political violence is not new to that South American nation of 38 million people. In the past 100 years, more than 500,000 Colombians have died in it. From the 'War of the Thousand Days,' a civil war at the turn of the century that left 100,000 dead, to a partisan clash between 1948 and 1966 that claimed nearly 300,000...
^ Bergquist, Charles; Robinson, David J. (2005). "Colombia". Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2005. Microsoft Corporation. Archived from the original on 2007-11-11. Retrieved 16 April 2006. On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated outside his law offices, in downtown Bogotá. The assassination marked the start of a decade of bloodshed, called La Violencia (The Violence), which took the lives of an estimated 180,000 Colombians before it subsided in 1958.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Livingstone, Grace; foreword by Pearce, Jenny (2004). Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy, and War. Rutgers University Press. p. 42. ISBN 0-8135-3443-7.
^ Britannica, 15th edition, 1992 printing^{[page needed]}
^ Palmowski, Jan (1997). A Dictionary of Twentieth Century World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192800169.^{[page needed]}
^ Grenville, J.A.S. (1994). A History of the World in the 20th Century.^{[page needed]}

[1] Stokes, Doug (2005). America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia. Zed Books. ISBN 1-84277-547-2. Azcarate quotes a figure of 300,000 dead between 1948–1959...^{[page needed]}

[2] Gutierrez, Pedro Ruz (31 October 1999). "Bullets, Bloodshed And Ballots". Orlando Sentinel. Archived from the original on 2016-08-15. Political violence is not new to that South American nation of 38 million people. In the past 100 years, more than 500,000 Colombians have died in it. From the 'War of the Thousand Days,' a civil war at the turn of the century that left 100,000 dead, to a partisan clash between 1948 and 1966 that claimed nearly 300,000...

[3] Bergquist, Charles; Robinson, David J. (2005). "Colombia". Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2005. Microsoft Corporation. Archived from the original on 2007-11-11. Retrieved 16 April 2006. On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated outside his law offices, in downtown Bogotá. The assassination marked the start of a decade of bloodshed, called La Violencia (The Violence), which took the lives of an estimated 180,000 Colombians before it subsided in 1958.

[Grace-4] Livingstone, Grace; foreword by Pearce, Jenny (2004). Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy, and War. Rutgers University Press. p. 42. ISBN 0-8135-3443-7.

[5] Britannica, 15th edition, 1992 printing^{[page needed]}

[6] Palmowski, Jan (1997). A Dictionary of Twentieth Century World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192800169.^{[page needed]}

[7] Grenville, J.A.S. (1994). A History of the World in the 20th Century.^{[page needed]}

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