This piece was written by Herbert Braun, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. He has spent a significant portion of his career writing about Colombian history, more specifically the time period of La Violencia starting with Gaitans’ assassination and the aftermath, which still has long lasting implications today.
Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was a liberal lawyer who challenged the traditional oligarchy in Colombia. He served as mayor of Bogotá and minister of labor and education. Gaitan was a populist; he rallied the lower and middle class working class and farmers to unite as one. He was able to use tonality and intonation to help insight the crowds of supporters. Unlike many leaders at the time he used his words instead
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The conservatives blamed the liberals for all the violence. In response there was a huge crack down on liberals. Liberals were purged from Colombia, much like socialists and communists were in other parts of Latin America. Liberals refused to take part in the 1948 election because they had no candidate. After the election the conservatives continued purging liberals out of the country, this resulted in the bloodiest years of La Violencia.
The third phase of La Violencia began with a military coup led by General Rojas. Although he tried to appease the poor and working class, the violence continued. Rojas then cracked down and did what was known as the pacification. The military was sent in to towns and villages where “trouble makers” were executed.
During the fourth phase of Las Violencia the violence began to subside. The National Front was created by leaders of both liberals and conservatives met in Spain to sign a treaty to achieve peace. They agreed to rotate power every four years in every faction of government. However, the end result of this agreement did very little to help the country. Any reforms that were passed often got reversed when the opposing party took control every four
Models for post-revolutionary Latin American government are born of the complex economic and social realities of 17th and 18th century Europe. From the momentum of the Enlightenment came major political rebellions of the elite class against entrenched national monarchies and systems of power. Within this time period of elitist revolt and intensive political restructuring, the fundamental basis for both liberal and conservative ideology was driven deep into Latin American soil. However, as neither ideology sought to fulfill or even recognize the needs or rights of mestizo people under government rule, the initial liberal doctrine pervading Latin American nations perpetuated racism and economic exploitation, and paved the way for all-consuming, cultural wars in the centuries to come.
Following the assassination of Madero and the assumption of power by Huerta in 1913, he returned to join the opposition under the revolutionary Venustiano Carranza. Using "hit and run" tactics, he gained control of northern Mexico, including Mexico City. As a result, his powerful fighting force became "La Division Del Norte." The two men soon became enemies, however, and when Carranza seized power in 1914, Villa led the rebellion against him.
In 1910, Francisco Madero, a son of wealthy plantation owners, instigated a revolution against the government of president Díaz. Even though most of his motives were political (institute effective suffrage and disallow reelections of presidents), Madero's revolutionary plan included provisions for returning seized lands to peasant farmers. The latter became a rallying cry for the peasantry and Zapata began organizing locals into revolutionary bands, riding from village to village, tearing down hacienda fences and opposing the landed elite's encroachment into their villages. On November 18, the federal government began rounding up Maderistas (the followers of Francisco Madero), and only forty-eight hours later, the first shots of the Mexican Revolution were fired. While the government was confide...
The Andes had a legacy of resistance that was unseen in other Spanish occupied place during the colonial period. There were rebellions of various kinds as a continued resistance to conquest. In the “Letters of Insurrection”, an anthology of letters written amongst the indigenous Andean people, between January and March 1781 in what is now known as Bolivia, a statement is made about the power of community-based rebellion. The Letters of Insurrection displays effects of colonization and how the “lesser-known” revolutionaries that lived in reducción towns played a role in weakening colonial powers and creating a place of identification for indigenous people.
The Allies’ victory in WWII marked democracy’s triumph over dictatorship, and the consequences shook Latin America. Questioning why they should support the struggle for democracy in Europe and yet suffer the constraints of dictatorship at home, many Latin Americans rallied to democratize their own political structures. A group of prominent middle–class Brazilians opposed to the continuation of the Vargas dictatorship mused publicly, “If we fight against fascism at the side of the United Nations so that liberty and democracy may be restored to all people, certainly we are not asking too much in demanding for ourselves such rights and guarantees.” The times favored the democratic concepts professed by the middle class. A wave of freedom of speech, press, and assembly engulfed much of Latin America and bathed the middle class with satisfaction. New political parties emerged to represent broader segments of the population. Democracy, always a fragile plant anywhere, seemed ready to blossom throughout Latin America. Nowhere was this change more amply illustrated than in Guatemala, where Jorge Ubico ruled as dictator from 1931 until 1944. Ubico, a former minister of war, carried out unprecedented centralization of the state and repression of his opponents. Although he technically ended debt peonage, the 1934 vagrancy law required the carrying of identification cards and improved ...
As the Medellín Cartel was the largest drug cartel in Colombia at the time, they had controlled 80% of all the cocaine supply that was entering the United States. Despite the fact that Escobar donated millions of dollars to the local people of Medellin and funded the construction of schools and sports centers to help create a good reputation for himself. But even if he did donate millions of dollars to the poor, it was still just a chip into the Medellín Cartel’s wealth. By looking at the statistics of the number of people who were affected by Escobar’s acts of terror it has become evident to me that the negative effects of the Medellín Cartel had heavily outweighed the benefits of how Escobar tried to give back to the local people of Colombia.
Victor de la Haya was once a celebrated Peruvian politician. He is remembered primarily as an advocate for democracy and workers' rights in Peru. Haya was often viewed as a great political reformer, who tried very hard to change the way the country was governed. In 1923, Haya is most known for establishing the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). His political career is filled with many bad periods where the Peruvian government and their neighboring allies turned against him. One such time he was forced to seek asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima, Peru for over 5 years. Victor de la Haya attracted a lot of attention to himself because of his strong outspoken views. As a result he gained a large number of followers and reputable friends who supported his reformation. But he also had almost as many enemies as friends, enemies that collaborated with Peruvian officials to have him arrested for charges and allegations not related to that of politics, but instead perhaps a result of his political alliances (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011).
...rancisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007. Print.
April 9, 1948, was a tragic day in Colombia’s history. On this day, Jorge Eliécer Gaítán, a candidate for the presidency of Colombia, was assassinated. In the 10 hour period that followed the assassination, angry mobs marched throughout the city of Bogota, looting and burning down over 100 buildings. Before the night would end, nearly 3,000 people would die in the streets. This terrible event in Colombia’s history is today referred to as the Bogotazo. This paper examines some of the underlying reasons contributing to the outbreak of this violence and the events that transpired during the Bogotazo. The paper concludes that the events leading to the violence of the Bogotazo are still present in Colombia today and will hamper its prospects for peace in the future.
Narcoterrorism has a long past in the history of Colombia, focusing mainly on the market development of one drug: cocaine. Colombia, with its arid tropical climate and lush land, is an ideal place for the sowing and reaping of the coca plant whose extracts are synthesized into the powder cocaine drug. As Colombian cocaine production skyrocketed in the 1970’s and 1980’s thanks to booming demand for the product in Americas, drug kingpins in Colombia began to wield immense power in the country. ...
It all began with Jose Efrain Rios Montt, the president/dictator of the time. Rios Montt was born on June 16, 1926, in the small town of Huehuetenango, Guatemala (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). In 1943, Rios Montt joined the Guatemalan army where he rose to the rank of a brigadier general (1). After serving as director of the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C., in 1973, he returned to Guatemala and ran unsuccessfully for president as the candidate of the National Opposition Front (Frente Nacional de Oposición;...
The government changed its tactics to end the rebellion, resorting to low intensity war. Paramilitaries with differing levels of tacit and explicit support terrorized Zapatistas and their sympathizers. The killings in Acteal in 1997 that claimed the lives of 45 innocent people remains a particularly gruesome example of paramilitary massacres.
The enlightment era was a time of change, many scientific and technological discoveries were coming about all over Europe, and many people started questioning the monarchies and their ways. They changed their traditional views and ideas on religion, politics, humanity, science, philosophy, and believed that humans had the capacity of improving. The enlightment era’s ideas of change backed by the poverty and oppression suffered by the people ignited the independence movement at places such as the British colonies in North America in 1776, and right after, the French people also got tired of the inequality and the crown’s excesses at the peoples expenses and in 1789 the French revolution which ended with the beheading of the French royalty erupted. Slowly the changes of ideas and power taking place over the world started coming into México and onto the hands of criollos and upper class mestizos who wanted the rights denied to them by the Spaniards and were thirsty for
In the case of Costa Rica, the support given to the Contras by the CIA generated a great deal of polarization between citizens who believed that the United States should not be involved in their affairs, and those citizens that thought the State should do more to combat communism (Background,
Violence and unrest began to escalate throughout El Salvador during the early seventies, as the 1972 presidential election witnessed the democratically elected Jose Napoleon Duarte replacement by the military and oligarchy backed Arturo Armando Molina (Anderson 2011). This trend of democratic repression and lack of transparency served to uphold the state’s legacy of economic, social, and political inequality which, Anderson notes, “erupted into revolutionary flames” (2011). The 1970s can be seen as the kindling of this fire, as political organizing centered around liberation theology and unionization became factors in the spark that set El Salvador ablaze, with women and men alike, serving as agentive incendiaries.