Violencia

The April 9th 1948, the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is assassinated during the meeting inaugural of the Organization of the American States (OAS) with Bogotá. The violent death of this eminent directing liberal party, often taxed with populist and whose popularity frightened the persons in charge of the conservative party as much as a nonmarginal fringe of its own faction, causes riots of an unchained violence which the Colombian history will remember under the name of “Bogotazo”.

The repression orchestrated by the conservatives with the capacity, joined together around the president Laureano Gum, transforms itself gradually into a true civil war opposing an intransigent, catholic line and reactionary on a left liberal but radicalized by the assassination of its chief and the environment of political intolerance of the moment. This conflict which lasts of 1948 with 1953 is known like “Violencia” and causes the death of almost 300.000 Colombians on a population estimated at 15 million inhabitants (2%). It is certainly the one of the more political violent ones conflicts of the history of the country and one period excessively traumatisante for the Colombian people. Violencia is in more than one way a key time to include/understand the development of the conflict. First of all, it causes the rebirth of movements guerillas of left, communist liberals then. It is time of Violencia which date appearance of the militia of country self-defense modern established to fight against the exactions of the soldiers and the preserving armed groups, militia which will give birth subsequently, inter alia, with the Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia (FARC). They were initially guerillas of liberal origin of which some will be transformed into communist guerillas, mainly in the departments of Cundinamarca (Bogotá) and of Tolima (Ibague). Following Violencia and single case in the Colombian history, the general Rojas Pinilla seizes the power in June 1953 by a coup d'etat with an aim of putting an end to this blood bath and of stabilizing a wavering democracy. The resumption in hand of the capacity by the soldiers allows a return to the normal gradually, without that meaning the complete stop of the combat which begin again with force at the end of 1953, thanks to a law of amnesty and with the relative neutrality of Pinilla vis-a-vis the conflict which opposes liberal and preserving. Most of the combatants of left refuse to deposit the weapons (the liberal factions accept the compromise whereas the Socialists radicalize themselves), take the maquis in the south of the country mainly in the areas of Huila and Tolima and are subject to the growing influence of the Communisme which is established then strongly in Latin America.

The general Rojas Pinilla is reversed in 1957 and is set up Front National. It is about an agreement between liberals and conservatives who, being aware of the ruin of the country after 10 years of civil war and of impossibility of leaving the crisis by simple elections, decide to share the capacity by being distributed the governmental loads equitably. Thus, of 1958 with 1978, liberals and conservatives will follow one another the capacity per four years period (duration of the presidential mandate) without no other political training being able to arise to the elections. If Front National incontestably supported the political stabilization of the country, it especially was a pact between controlling elites which completely locked the political game and restricted the Colombian democracy considerably. It is about a true negation of pluralism and political expansion which encouraged noninstitutional modes of dispute and violent one and exacerbated frustrations of all those which did not feel by represented by leading oligarchy.

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