La Violencia Totally Explained

Everything about La Violencia totally explained

La Violencia (literally "The Violence", in Spanish) is a term that refers to an era of civil conflict in various areas of the Colombian countryside between supporters of the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Conservative Party, a conflict which took place roughly from 1948 to 1958 (exact dates vary).

Origins

Around 1930, after a long line of conservative presidents in Colombia, control of the government passed to the liberals, creating an atmosphere of political intolerance between the two parties and eventual disturbances and fights all over the country during the next decade. In 1946, the situation was reversed with conservative Mariano Ospina Pérez's rise to the presidency.
   In April 1947, the Jornada newspaper covered the murder of a local politician and his wife in Ráquira. They were killed with machetes and the corpses were desecrated, their eyes having been carved out. The crime was attributed to political dissidents. The following November, some liberal congressmen proposed legislation to remove the police forces from direct control by the executive, to which conservatives were strongly opposed; including statements from the conservative senator José Antonio Montalvo to El Siglo newspaper about the need of attack the liberals with deadly force.
   In the first days of January 1948, armed conflict between peasants in small villages in the Santander Department caused the complete destruction of the Román Village. This and the preceding events moved the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán to call a mass march known as the March of Silence and a collective prayer for peace in Bogotá.
   The assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in April 1948 triggered large riots in Bogotá and smaller scale uprisings throughout the country, especially in rural areas and small towns. This would mark the beginning of "La Violencia", a period of intense partisan conflict that would cost an estimated 180,000 to 300,000 Colombian lives over the next decade.
   Some historians disagree about the dates: some argue it started in 1946 when the Conservatives came back into government, because at a local level the leadership of the police forces and town councils changed hands, encouraging Conservative peasants to seize land from Liberal peasants and setting off a new wave of bi-partisan violence in the countryside. But traditionally, most historians argue that La Violencia began with the death of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Later other organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) emerged, marking the beginning of a guerrilla insurgency.
   From the point of view of members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian Communist Party, the Liberal and Conservative elites, though they'd instigated the original violence they soon grew to fear the consequences of it, and thus formed a loose alliance to preserve their shared desire for political hegemony from possible revolutionary challenges.

Credence in conspiracy theories as causes of violence

As is common of twentieth century eliminationist political violence, the rationales for action immediately before La Violencia were founded on conspiracy theories that blamed scapegoats 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.

Anticlerical conspiracy theory

anticlerical attacks and killings, particularly in the early years of La Violencia. Some propaganda leaflets circulated in Medellín blamed a favorite of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), for the murder of Gaitán.
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. One priest, Pedro María Ramírez, 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.
Despite the conspiracy theories and propaganda after Gaitán’s killing, most on the left learned from their errors in the rioting on April 9, and typically quit believing that priests had harbored weapons.

Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory

Conservatives likewise had been motivated to fight against a supposed international Judeo-Masonic conspiracy by eliminating the Liberals in their midst. 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, many prominent Liberal politicians actually being freemasons.
   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 (by this time Jesuits outside of Colombia had already questioned and published disputes of the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the concept of 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 to draft an encyclical against anti-Semitism and racism). 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. 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.
   News of atrocities at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, causing both sides in Colombia to fear it could happen in their country, also spurred the credibility of the conspiracies and the rationale for violence. 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.
   Since both camps claimed the existence of some sort of conspiracy, they managed to make the political environment toxic, increasing the animosity and suspicion of the other party.
   (see also Catholicism and Freemasonry)

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