|Murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán| |Colombian Communist Party|
|Presidents of Colombia| |Mariano Ospina Pérez| |Gustavo Rojas
Pinilla| La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja],
The Violence) was the ten-year (1948–58) period of civil war in
Colombia, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the
Colombian Liberal Party whose respective supporters fought most
battles in the rural country.  La Violencia began with the 9
April 1948 assassination of the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán,
a Liberal Party presidential candidate who was very popular
among mainstream Colombian society; his political murder
provoked the Bogotazo rioting that lasted for ten hours and
killed some 5,000 people. An alternative historical perspective
of La Violencia proposed 1946 as the start of civil-war
violence, the year when the Conservatives returned to government
power; when rural-town police and political leaders encouraged
Conservative-party peasants to seize the agricultural lands of
Liberal-party peasants, which provok