El Bogotazo and La Violencia
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot dead in the street in Bogotá on 9 April 1948, and the city destroyed itself in the following hours. He was the Liberal Party's presidential candidate and its most popular figure in a generation — a lawyer of modest origins whose speeches attacked the oligarchy of both parties and drew crowds of hundreds of thousands, and who was expected to win in 1950. The killer was lynched by the crowd within minutes, which removed any possibility of establishing who, if anyone, had sent him. The riot that followed is called the Bogotazo. Trams were burned, the centre of the city was gutted, government buildings and churches were attacked, and something between 500 and 3,000 people were killed in three days. A Pan-American conference was sitting in the city at the time, with a young Cuban law student named Fidel Castro among the delegates to a parallel student congress. What followed was worse and lasted a decade. La Violencia was a partisan civil war fought largely in the countryside between Liberal and Conservative peasants, with police and paramilitary bands on both sides, and it killed something like 200,000 people. Massacres were village-scale and intimate, and the methods acquired their own vocabulary. The two parties ended it in 1958 by agreeing to alternate the presidency and share every office between them for sixteen years — the National Front, which brought peace and excluded everyone outside the two parties from politics. The FARC and the ELN were founded in 1964.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Political
