El Bogotazo and La Violencia
On 9 April 1948 the assassination of the Liberal populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in Bogota triggered massive riots (the Bogotazo) that gutted the capital. The killing detonated La Violencia, a decade-long partisan civil war between Liberal and Conservative factions that spread through the Colombian countryside. Framed through a Cold War lens, the Conservative government, backed by the Church, portrayed Liberal partisans as communists. Rural massacres and forced displacement killed an estimated 200,000 people and permanently reshaped Colombia's population geography, sowing the armed peasant self-defence movements that later became the FARC. Structurally this is a civil war between organised rival political factions for control of the state, the dominant crisis of the Colombian polity at mid-century.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
