All events · The War's Long Shadow

La Violencia in Colombia

1948–1958 · Americas

Displacement Mass Killing Sexual Violence

Displaced

1.5 million

Between one and two million people, roughly 10-20 per cent of Colombia's population, were driven from their land between 1948 and 1958; the Norwegian Refugee Council gives one to two million, of whom about 150,000 crossed into Venezuela, while the foundational 1962 study La Violencia en Colombia by German Guzman, Orlando Fals Borda and Eduardo Umana Luna and Colombia's Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica are the source of the two million figure. Estimates of rural properties that changed hands under duress range from about 200,000 to 400,000. All rest on parish records, municipal registries and retrospective reconstruction rather than contemporaneous registration.

Share of the population affected

13%

of the population of Colombia at the 1951 national census, 1951

Killed

100,000–300,000

direct killing

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

The assassination of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá on 9 April 1948 set off riots and then a decade of partisan killing in the Colombian countryside, in which Liberal and Conservative armed groups, police and army units destroyed villages, massacred families and drove opponents off their land. Deaths are conventionally estimated at around 200,000, within a published range of roughly 100,000 to 300,000, and about two million people were displaced, many permanently into the cities. Land seizure was a central mechanism rather than a by-product, concentrating coffee and cattle holdings. The violence was formally ended by the National Front power-sharing pact of 1958, but the self-defence groups and agrarian grievances it left behind fed directly into the guerrilla insurgencies from 1964 that the atlas already covers. Colombia's Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica treats La Violencia as the opening phase of a continuous armed conflict.

Parties

Liberal and Conservative partisans, police and army units killed and drove out rural populations of the opposing affiliation and seized their land

Disputed

The death toll, estimated between about 100,000 and 300,000 with no authoritative count, and the degree to which national party leaderships directed rather than tolerated the rural violence.

The denominator

Colombia's 1951 census (DANE) counted 11,548,172 inhabitants, of whom roughly 61 per cent, about seven million, lived in rural areas.

Displacement was almost entirely rural, so measured against the roughly seven million rural Colombians of 1951 the share is more than double the national figure.

Where the baseline comes from

La Violencia — Wikipediaopen-edited
Demographics of Colombia — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The commonly cited central figure is about 200,000. The range reflects the absence of any systematic registration during the period: estimates were built up after the fact from parish burial books, municipal records and regional studies, and differ over which years and which categories of killing to include.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingDestruction of PropertySexual ViolenceEnforced Disappearance

The 1962 study by Guzmán, Fals Borda and Umaña Luna and subsequent reports of the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica document the village massacres, burnings, rapes and disappearances.

Movements mapped

Rural families displaced from Tolima and the coffee belt to Bogota and other cities

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Colombia

Sources

La Violencia — Wikipediaopen-edited
Bogotazo — Wikipediaopen-edited
Colombian conflict — Wikipediaopen-edited
Colombia's bloody history — Norwegian Refugee CouncilNGO