But the violence raged on.Īt that point, it seemed like there might be some hope of a resolution soon, as a few of the top “bandit leaders” were found and killed by government forces of the Liberal-Conservative coalition that would go on to rule Colombia for decades more. In 1958, the Liberals and Conservatives finally patched up their differences and formed the Frente Nacional coalition, hoping to restore peace. In 1953, Military Strongman Gustavo Rojas Pinilla granted an amnesty when that failed, he bombed villages harboring bandits and imprisoned entire communities. Successive governments sent troops in, but the terrain and guerrilla tactics of the peasant gangs proved too much. With the grim slogan of “Leave no seed,” children were murdered, men emasculated, pregnant women cut open.
Some machete-wielding fighters specialized in the franela cut, in which the victim’s head was sheared from his body with an incision resembling the circular neckline of a flannel undershirt others preferred the corbata-one slice across the throat, through which the victim’s tongue was pulled, to look like a necktie. Soon killing became an end in itself, sadistic and without cause.
Conservatives drove Liberals from their villages Liberals in turn regrouped as guerrillas, making the plains their stronghold. “Colombians simply call it la violencia, the only way to describe the sense less slaughter and banditry waged by hate-filled peasants who long ago forgot what they were fighting about,” TIME noted at that time, in 1964, explaining how that violence started:Ĭolombia’s violence started in 1948 as an ugly political war between the country’s Liberals and Conservatives-triggered by the assassination of Liberal Party Leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.
0 kommentar(er)
