La Violencia

La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year wave of civil conflict and unrest in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, mainly fought in the countryside. 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. His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting, which lasted ten hours and resulted in around 5,000 casualties. An alternative historiography proposes the Conservative Party's return to power following the election of 1946 to be the cause. 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. La Violencia is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people, almost 1 in 50 Colombians.