The Bogotazo and La Violencia

On April 9, 1948, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the most popular Liberal politician and favorite to win the 1950 election, was shot in the center of Bogota by Juan Roa Sierra, who was lynched on the spot. Crowds began rioting, burning trams and government buildings, and looting. The riots, called the Bogotazo, left large parts of the capital in ruins, and violence spread to towns across Colombia.¹

Colombia's Liberal and Conservative parties had been rivals since the 1800s, and party identity was passed down in families and villages. Gaitan had built a populist movement among the urban poor and rural workers against both party elites. His murder removed a leader who might have channeled this anger and unleashed it instead. The Ninth Pan-American Conference, which created the Organization of American States, was meeting in Bogota that day, and Fidel Castro, then a student, was in the city. La Violencia lasted roughly from 1948 to 1958, killing perhaps 200,000 people, mostly peasants, in massacres, rural militias and reprisals. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla took power in a coup in 1953, and in 1958 the two parties agreed to the National Front, alternating the presidency for 16 years. The arrangement ended the fighting among parties but excluded other groups, and left peasant guerrillas, from which the FARC emerged in 1964.¹²