La Violencia
La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, fought mainly in the countryside.
| La Violencia | |||
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| Part of the Colombian Civil Wars | |||
| Date | 9 April 1948 – 1958 | ||
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| Resulted in | Stalemate
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| 200,000 civilians killed (1947–60) | |||
| La Violencia |
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Colombia portal
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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 cost the lives of at least 200,000 people, almost 2% of the population of the country at the time.