[1][2][3] La Violencia is considered to have begun with the assassination on 9 April 1948 of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate and frontrunner for the 1949 November election.

Several priests were accused of openly encouraging the murder of the political opposition during Catholic mass, including the Santa Rosa de Osos Bishop Miguel Ángel Builes, although this is unproven.

These events were recounted in the 1950 book Lo que el cielo no perdona ("What heaven doesn't forgive"), written by the secretary to Builes, Father Fidel Blandon Berrio.

Jorge Zalamea, director of Critica magazine, fled to Buenos Aires; Luis Vidales to Chile; Antonio Garcia to La Paz, and Gerardo Molina to Paris.

[13] Some consider La Violencia having started at this point because the Conservative government began increasing the backlash against Liberal protests and small rebel groups.

[11] On April 9, 1948, Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated by Juan Roa Sierra on the street in Bogotá, via three shots from a revolver.

[11][15] This began the Bogotazo as angry mobs beat Roa Sierra to death and headed to the presidential palace with the intent of killing President Ospina Pérez.

[15] Attempting to end La Violencia, the Liberals, who had majority control of Congress, began impeachment proceedings against President Ospina Pérez on November 9, 1949.

[16] After Alfredo Silva's disappearance, Velásquez assumed power of the forces in the Eastern Plains that, by April 1950, included seven rebel zones with hundreds of guerrillas known as the "cowboys".

The Conservative army then increased its offensive attacks; committing atrocities along the way, they burned entire villages, slaughtered animals, and massacred suspected rebels, as well as set up a blockade of the region.

In December 1951 and January 1952, Alfonso López Pumarejo, the former Colombian president and leader of the Liberal Party, made visits to the Eastern Plains to renew his alliance with the "cowboys".

[15] When López Pumarejo returned to Bogotá he issued declarations stating that the guerrillas were not criminals but were simply fighting for freedom, and in response the Conservative dictatorship shut down the newspapers and imposed strict censorship.

[15] In 1952 the future revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then an unknown young man traveling through South America, briefly visited Bogotá.

In a letter he wrote to his mother on July 6, 1952, later published in "The Motorcycle Diaries", Guevara noted that "There is more repression of individual freedom here than in any country we've been to, the police patrol the streets carrying rifles and demand your papers every few minutes".

[15] On January 1, 1953, these groups came together to launch an attack against the Palanquero Air Base, with the hope of using the jet planes to bomb Bogotá and force the resignation of the Conservative dictatorship.

Most of the armed groups (called guerrillas liberales, a pejorative term) were demobilized during the amnesty declared by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla after he took power on 13 June 1953.

Civilian rule was restored after moderate Conservatives and Liberals, with the support of dissident sectors of the military, agreed to unite under a bipartisan coalition known as the National Front and the government of Alberto Lleras Camargo and which included a system of alternating the president and power-sharing both in cabinets and public offices.

As was common of 20th-century eliminationist political violence, the rationales for action immediately before La Violencia were founded on conspiracy theories, each of which blamed the other side as traitors beholden to international cabals.

[20] This conspiracy theory supplied the rationale for Liberal Party radicals to engage in violence, notably the anti-clerical attacks and killings, particularly in the early years of La Violencia.

[21] Across the country, militants attacked churches, convents, and monasteries, killing priests and looking for arms, because they believed that the clergy had guns, a rumor which was proven to be false when no serviceable weapons were found during the raids.

[20] One priest, Pedro María Ramírez Ramos, was slaughtered with machetes and hauled through the street behind a truck, despite the fact that the militants had previously searched the church grounds and found no weapons.

[21] Despite the circulation of the conspiracy theories and the propaganda after Gaitán was killed, most of the leftists who were involved in the rioting on 9 April learned from their errors, and as a result, they stopped believing that priests had harbored weapons.