La Violencia

Since the 1920s, when the Conservatives had control of government, and even into the 1930s, when Liberals regained control of the government, there were violent clashes between peasants and landowners, as well as workers and industry owners.[11] The number of yearly deaths however, were far less than the estimates of those in La Violencia.[11]

In the 1946 election, Mariano Ospina Pérez of the Conservative party won the presidency, largely because the Liberal votes were split between two Liberal candidates.[12] Some consider La Violencia having started at this point because the Conservative government began increasing the backlash against Liberal protests and small rebel groups.[13] There were an estimated 14,000 deaths in 1947 due to this violence.[11]

On April 9, 1948, Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated by Juan Roa Sierra on the street in Bogotá, via three shots from a revolver.[14] Gaitán was a popular candidate and would have been the likely winner of the 1950 election.[11][14] This began the Bogotazo as angry mobs beat Roa Sierra to death and headed to the presidential palace with the intent of killing President Ospina Pérez.[14] The murder of Gaitán and subsequent rioting sparked other popular uprisings throughout the country.[11] Because of the Liberal nature of these revolts, the police and military, who had been largely neutral before, either defected or became aligned with the Conservative government.[11][14]

Initially, Liberal leaders in Colombia worked with the Conservative government to stop uprisings and root out Communists.[11][14] In May of 1949, Liberal leaders resigned from their positions within the Ospina Pérez administration, due to the widespread persecution of Liberals throughout the country.[14] Attempting to end La Violencia the Liberals, who had majority control of Congress, began impeachment proceedings against President Ospina Pérez on November 9, 1949.[14] In response, Ospina Pérez dissolved the Congress, creating a Conservative dictatorship. The Liberal Party decided to stage a military coup, and it was planned for November 25, 1949.[14] However, many of the party members decided it was not a good idea and called it off. One conspirator, Air Force Captain Alfredo Silva, in the city of Villavicencio, had not been notified of the abandonment of the plan and carried it out. After rallying the Villavicencio garrison, he disarmed the police and took control of the city.[14] Silva proceeded to urge others in the region to join the revolt, and Eliseo Velásquez, a peasant guerrilla leader, took Puerto López on December 1, 1949, as well as capturing other villages in the Meta River region.[14] In this time, Silva was caught and arrested by troops from Bogotá coming to take back control of Villavicencio.[14]

In 1950, Laureano Gómez was elected president of Colombia, but it was a largely manipulated election, leading Gómez to become the new Conservative dictator.[15]

After Alfredo Silva's disappearance, Velásquez assumed power of the forces in the Eastern Plains that, by April of 1950, included seven rebel zones with hundreds of guerrillas known as the "cowboys".[14] While in command of the forces, Velásquez suffered from a superiority complex, leading him to commit abuses including body mutilation of those killed.[14] Without sufficient arms, during the first major offensive of the Conservative army, the Liberal forces took major losses and confidence in Velásquez was lost.[14] New populist leaders took control of the different groups of rebels and eventually came together to impose a 10% tax on wealthy landowners in the region.[14] This tax created divisions from the wealthy Liberals and the Conservative government used them to recruit counter guerrillas. The Conservative army then increased its offensive attacks; committing atrocities along the way, they burned entire villages, slaughtered animals, and massacred suspected rebels, as well as set up a blockade of the region.[14] The rebels were able to combat the offensive with small, covert, attacks to capture outposts and supplies. By June of 1951, the government agreed to a truce with the guerrilla forces and they temporarily lifted the blockade.[14]

A few months after the truce, larger army units were sent to the Eastern Plains to end the Liberal revolt, but they were still unsuccessful.[14] In this time, the Liberal leadership in Bogotá realized the Conservatives were not giving up power any time soon, and they wanted to organize a national revolt. In December of 1951 and January of 1952, Alfonso López Pumarejo, the former Colombian president and leader of the Liberal Party, made visits to the Eastern Plains to renew his alliance with the "cowboys".[14] When López Pumarejo returned to Bogotá he issued declarations stating that the guerrillas were not criminals but were simply fighting for freedom, and in response the Conservative dictatorship shut down the newspapers and imposed strict censorship.[14] 1952 passed with only small skirmishes and no organized guerrilla leader, but by June of 1953, Guadalupe Salcedo had assumed command.[14]

In other parts of Colombia, different rebel groups had formed in throughout 1950; they formed in Antioquia, Tolima, Sumapaz, and the Middle Magdalena Valley.[14] On January 1, 1953, these groups came together to launch an attack against the Palanquero Air Base, with the hope of using the jet planes to bomb Bogotá and force the resignation of the Conservative dictatorship.[14] The attack relied entirely on surprise to be successful, but the rebel were spotted by the sentry posts and were quickly hit with machine gun fire.[14] The attempt was a failure, however it did incite fear into Bogotá elites.

Due to incomplete or non-existent statistical records, exact measurement of La Violencia's humanitarian consequences is impossible. Scholars, however, estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 lives were lost; 600,000 to 800,000 were injured; and almost one million people were displaced. La Violencia directly or indirectly affected 20 percent of the population.[16]

La Violencia did not acquire its name simply because of the number of people it affected; it was the manner in which most of the killings, maimings, and dismemberings were done. Certain death and torture techniques became so commonplace that they were given names—for example, picar para tamal, which involved slowly cutting up a living person's body; or bocachiquiar, where hundreds of small punctures were made until the victim slowly bled to death. Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs for the United States National Security Council and current President of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, Norman A. Bailey describes the atrocities succinctly: "Ingenious forms of quartering and beheading were invented and given such names as the 'corte de mica', 'corte de corbata' (aka Colombian necktie), and so on. Crucifixions and hangings were commonplace, political 'prisoners' were thrown from airplanes in flight, infants were bayoneted, schoolgirls, some as young as eight years old, were raped en masse, unborn infants were removed by crude Caesarian section and replaced by roosters, ears were cut off, scalps removed, and so on."[16] While scholars, historians, and analysts have all debated the source of this era of unrest, they have yet to formulate a widely accepted explanation for why it escalated to the notable level it did.

As a result of La Violencia, landowners were allowed to create private armies for their security, which was formally legalized in 1965. Holding private armies was made illegal in 1989, only to be made legal once more in 1994.[17]

As was common of 20th-century eliminationist political violence, the rationales for action immediately before La Violencia were founded on conspiracy theories, each of which blamed the other side as traitors beholden to international cabals. The left were painted as participants in a global Judeo-Masonic conspiracy against Christianity, and the right were painted as agents of a Nazi-Falangist plot against democracy and progress.

After the death of Gaitán, a conspiracy theory circulating among the left, that leading conservatives and militant priests were involved in a plot with Nazis and Falangists to take control of the country and undo the country's moves toward progress, spurred the violence.[19] This conspiracy theory supplied the rationale for Liberal Party radicals to engage in violence, notably the anti-clerical attacks and killings, particularly in the early years of La Violencia. Some propaganda leaflets circulating in Medellín blamed a favorite of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), for the murder of Gaitán.[20]

Across the country, militants attacked churches, convents, and monasteries, killing priests and looking for arms, since the conspiracy theory maintained that the religious had guns, and this despite the fact that not a single serviceable weapon was located in the raids.[19] One priest, Pedro María Ramírez Ramos, was slaughtered with machetes and hauled through the street behind a truck, despite the fact that the militants had previously searched the church grounds and found no weapons.[20]

Despite the conspiracy theories and propaganda after Gaitán's killing, most on the left learned from their errors in the rioting on 9 April, and stopped believing that priests had harbored weapons.[21]

The claims by both camps of the existence of some sort of conspiracy made the political environment toxic, increasing the animosity and suspicion of both parties.[22]

Conservatives likewise had been motivated to fight against a supposed international Judeo-Masonic conspiracy by eliminating the Liberals in their midst.[23] In the two decades prior to La Violencia, Conservative politicians and churchmen adopted from Europe the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory to portray the Liberal Party as involved in an international anti-Christian plot, with many prominent Liberal politicians actually being Freemasons.[24]

Although the rhetoric of conspiracy was in large part introduced and circulated by some of the clergy, as well as by Conservative politicians, by 1942 many clerics were critical of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. Jesuits outside of Colombia had already questioned and published disputes of the authenticity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pushing the concept of a global Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. Colombian clergy were also increasingly influenced in this matter by U.S. clergy; and Pius XI had asked U.S. Jesuit John LaFarge, Jr. to draft an encyclical against anti-Semitism and racism.[25] Allegations of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy played most prominently in the politics of Laureano Gómez, who directed the Colombian Conservative Party from 1932 to 1953.[26] More provincial politicians followed suit, and the fact that prominent national and local politicians were voicing this conspiracy theory, rather than just a portion of the clergy, gave the idea greater credibility while it gathered momentum among the party members.

The atrocities that had happened at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 were seen by both sides as a possible precedent for Colombia, causing both sides to fear it could happen in their country; this also spurred the credibility of the conspiracies and the rationale for violence.[22] Catholics everywhere were shocked by the wave of anticlerical violence in the Republican zones in Spain in the first months of that war where anarchists, socialists and communists burned churches and murdered nearly 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns, and used this to justify their own mass killings of Jews, Masons, and socialists.[22]