Guillermo Leon Valencia
Guillermo Leon Valencia ordered the operation that destroyed the peasant republics, and the survivors founded the guerrilla army that fought Colombia for the next fifty-two years. He was a Conservative senator and the son of a poet, and he took office in 1962 as the second president of the National Front - the pact under which Liberals and Conservatives alternated the presidency and divided every office between them, which had ended the partisan slaughter of the previous decade at the cost of closing politics to everyone else. In the mountains south of the capital, communities that had armed themselves during the Violence were governing themselves outside the state. The press and the congress called them independent republics, and the phrase did a great deal of work in the debate that followed. In May 1964 Valencia sent the army into the largest of them, Marquetalia, with sixteen thousand men, aircraft and American advisers, against a few dozen armed peasants. The settlement was taken. Forty-eight of its defenders escaped into the cordillera, and two years later constituted themselves as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The war that began there ran until a peace agreement in 2016 and killed something over two hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, and displaced seven million. Whether Marquetalia caused it or merely named the date is argued about, since the communities were already armed and the National Front had already closed the electoral route; what is not argued about is that a state operation against a village of a few hundred produced an insurgency that outlasted every government that fought it. Valencia finished his term, handed over to a Liberal as the pact required, and died in 1971.
- Lived: 1909 CE – 1971 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
