Between 1948 and 1958, Colombia lived through a war that preferred not to call itself one. La Violencia was not a civil war in the classical sense; there were no defined fronts or armies in the field, but rather a machinery of rural dispossession in which party affiliation decided the fate of farms and bodies. Two hundred thousand deaths later, the elites agreed on the Frente Nacional, a power-sharing arrangement that solved the notables’ problem without touching the land. In 1964, when the Army arrived at Marquetalia with 16,000 soldiers to dislodge a small nucleus of armed peasants, it did not understand that it was manufacturing what it sought to destroy. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were not born from an imported doctrine or a Havana slogan. They were born from a calculation that history had slowly verified; when all legal avenues close, the rifle ceases to be an option and becomes a conclusion.
I. The War of Colours
La Violencia has official dates (1948-1958) and a death toll that historians place between 180,000 and 300,000 depending on the counting methodology. It also has a convenient narrative that official historiography carried for decades; two atavistic parties massacring each other in a senseless spiral of vengeance, primordial passion, peasant irrationality. That reading is comfortable and false. The first great agrarian reform of the twentieth century in Colombia was La Violencia, only in reverse; it did not redistribute land towards those who worked it but reordered it towards those who had the right party. The Liberal and Conservative shared the same hacienda economy, the same contempt for any structural reform, the same surnames in the same boardrooms. What they disputed was who administered public contracts, mayoral posts, and property registries in the country’s interior. Violence was the mechanism of that dispute, not its cause.
The peasant who migrated after the Bogotazo to a conservative village with a liberal identity card did not carry a political manifesto. He carried the fear of having been born on the wrong side of an invisible border that no one had chosen. In zones of the Tolima, Huila, the Llanos, Antioquia and the Santanderes, party membership decided whether the farm survived or burned, whether the mayor signed the papers or mislaid them, whether the police protected or raided. The chulavita and the pájaros, irregular forces of conservative origin that operated with lists and chain of command, were not anomalies of the system but instruments of territorial administration; gangs with a dispossession logic that transferred properties to families of the right party, under cover of local bosses who then registered the purchases in notaries that asked no questions. Displacement was the real mechanism of the war; partisan ideology was its alibi.
In that climate, the peasant self-defences were not an ideological invention. They were a survival response. Persecuted liberal communities organised armed mutual-vigilance groups, heirs to a tradition stretching back to the nineteenth-century wars, which found in the mountains an elementary logic; if the State comes to kill, one must be in a position to respond. Men like Pedro Antonio Marín, who would take the alias Manuel Marulanda Vélez, learned the trade of arms not in a Soviet school but in the villages of southern Tolima, where surviving required organisation, discipline and a territory to defend. That pedagogy of the mountains would be the real substrate of what came next, more decisive than any Marxist handbook circulating through the fields.
According to estimates from the National Commission of Inquiry into the Causes of La Violencia, the bipartisan conflict left between 1948 and 1957 a toll approaching two hundred thousand dead in a country that did not exceed twelve million inhabitants, with more than two million internal displaced persons. (National Commission of Inquiry into the Causes of La Violencia, 1958)
The dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) offered an amnesty that partially demobilised the cycle of violence, but did not touch the root. Land was not redistributed, latifundia survived intact, and the displaced did not recover their properties. Rojas Pinilla promised order, not justice. The effect was an armed pause, not pacification. When the parties negotiated their exit from power in 1957 through the plebiscite that opened the path to the Frente Nacional, they did so to restore oligarchic alternation, not to resolve the peasant grievance that had fuelled the massacre. That calculation, made in Bogotá offices, would have consequences measured in decades and in territories that its authors never set foot in.
II. The Pact of the Notables
The Frente Nacional was the most elegant solution that the Colombian elite could design to resolve its own problem. From 1958 to 1974, the presidency alternated between liberals and conservatives every four years, ministries were divided in equal proportions, and any different party was excluded from government participation by constitutional provision. The agreement ended La Violencia bipartisane because it eliminated the object of the dispute; if the sharing of power is guaranteed by the Constitution, there is no reason to massacre each other over town halls. For the elites, the Frente Nacional was a technical success. For the landless peasant, it was confirmation that the system had no place for him.
Agrarian reform was the promise that the Frente Nacional brandished without fulfilling. In 1961 the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform was created with the mandate to redistribute public lands, issue land titles and endow peasant families displaced by La Violencia with land. During its first twenty years of existence, the body titled land at a pace that rendered illusory any statistical measure of progress. Concentration did not ease. The Gini index of land, which measures inequality in the distribution of agrarian property on a scale from zero (perfectly equal distribution) to one (total concentration in a single owner), remained above 0.85 in Colombia throughout the Frente Nacional decades, one of the highest records in the hemisphere. The hacienda and the latifundium survived the constitutional change with the same ease with which they had survived La Violencia, being the setting for exclusion rather than its victim.
For the peasant from Tolima or Meta who had survived the war of colours, the Frente Nacional brought no new grammar. It brought the same map of local powers, the same surnames at the mayor’s office, the same tenancy and day-labour conditions. The difference was that exclusion was now constitutionalised. It was not the result of a conjunctural conspiracy but the visible design of the system. The perception that the legal avenue was a dead end required no sophisticated theoretical elaboration; it sufficed to live in a village in the south of the country and calculate how many years it would take for the agrarian reform institute to arrive, if it ever did, and how much land would remain available once regional landowners had finished registering what they already controlled in practice.
It was in that void that peasant self-defence communities found a reason to persist. Not yet as a guerrilla, but as a de facto local government in zones where the State was not presence but organised absence. In the territories of the Sumapaz, the Pato, the Duda, Riochiquito and Marquetalia, groups coming from the liberal resistance built rudimentary forms of community administration; they resolved disputes, organised production and maintained a defensive capacity that had allowed them to survive La Violencia. Senator Álvaro Gómez Hurtado called them independent republics in a 1961 speech that turned those communities into a national security threat. The label was a political decision; naming the problem in that way demanded a military response, not an agrarian reform. And the elites always preferred the response that cost them no land.
III. Marquetalia
Operation Sovereignty, launched in May 1964 under the government of Guillermo León Valencia, was presented as the recovery of national territory from the hands of a group of outlaws. The logic was simple in its formulation; a State that cannot exercise sovereignty on its own soil is not a State. The reality of the operation was less heroic. Approximately 16,000 troops of the Colombian Army, with air support and US advisement within the framework of hemispheric security doctrine, were deployed against a nucleus that the survivors themselves would recall as forty-eight combatants on the Marquetalia plateau, in the central cordillera of the Tolima. The proportion was not an accidental figure. It was the measure of the fear those communities inspired in the elite and its external advisers, and also the measure of what it cost not to have distributed land in time.
Marulanda and Jacobo Arenas escaped into the mountains with their men before the encirclement closed. The Army took the plateau, planted flags and declared the operation a success. What it did not take was the men. And the men were the organisation. In July 1964, from the mountains, the Agrarian Programme of the Guerrillas was drafted, the first political document of the group that in 1966 would adopt the name of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The State had evicted a nucleus of peasants from a mountain plot. That nucleus had founded a guerrilla. That exchange summarises with precision what Colombia paid for not having carried out the agrarian reform.
Operation Sovereignty, executed in May 1964, mobilised approximately 16,000 troops of the Colombian Army against a reduced nucleus of combatants on the Marquetalia plateau. The survivors withdrew and issued the Agrarian Programme of the Guerrillas on 20 July 1964, the founding document of the organisation that in 1966 would adopt the name FARC. (Historical Commission on the Conflict and its Victims, 2015)
The paradox of Marquetalia was not accidental. It was the result of a deliberate choice between two options the State had available; to distribute land to peasant communities or to expel them militarily. The first would have required confronting the large regional landowners whose alliance sustained the Frente Nacional. The second required helicopters and soldiers, expenditure that touched no latifundium. The political calculation was not difficult. What nobody in the War Ministry calculated, or nobody wanted to calculate, is that the eviction of Marquetalia would not solve the agrarian problem. It would convert it into a security problem for the next fifty years, and that problem would be charged in a currency the country is still paying.
IV. The Agrarian Programme
The document that Marulanda and his companions issued on 20 July 1964 is revealing precisely for its ideological modesty. The Agrarian Programme of the Guerrillas is not a Leninist vanguard text; there is no Hegelian dialectic or references to the Communist International. It is an inventory of peasant grievances formulated in direct language; redistribution of large agrarian property, delivery of land to those who work it, cancellation of tenants’ debts, credit and technical assistance for the small producer, respect for indigenous reserves. The text could have been drafted by any Latin American agrarian movement of the 1960s without needing a rifle. The difference is that those who signed it had already learned that formulating it without a rifle led nowhere.
The connection with the Bogotazo and La Violencia is direct and documented. Marulanda was seventeen years old when 9 April altered the country. He grew up in a region struck by armed bipartisanism, watched how the promise of reform dissolved with each change of government, understood that the institutions of the Frente Nacional were a design to perpetuate the sharing of power among those who already had everything. His trajectory was not that of an intellectual seduced by the Cuban Revolution, although the 1959 revolution offered a model and encouraged a certain regional mystique. It was that of a peasant who had accumulated an empirical knowledge of what the Colombian State did and did not do when someone asked it for land and justice. That knowledge had a starting date, had counted bodies, and had the consistency of a structure that repeated itself with the regularity of harvests.
The Agrarian Programme was also the first public articulation of what would be the political axis of the FARC during their first two decades. It was not a proposal for socialist revolution in the Cuban style, even if the language of the era and continental solidarity added that colouring. It was, at its core, a demand that the Colombian State fulfil what its own Constitution and its own laws promised. The insurgency began exactly where the unkept promise ended, at the point where exhaustion of the legal avenue became verifiable and the armed alternative ceased to be one option among others and became the only one remaining.
V. The Mountain as State
At the Second Conference of the Southern Bloc, held in 1966, the group formally adopted the name of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and approved its first organisational statutes. It ceased to be a local self-defence and became, at least in project, a national organisation with regional commands, territorial fronts and a vertical command structure that disciplined expansion. The leap was not military but political; the decision to contest territories, not merely defend them. The difference between a self-defence that protects its plot and a guerrilla that extends its map of influence implies a different wager on time and resources. The FARC chose the long game, and in Colombia the long game had always favoured those who could wait.
What the State built at Marquetalia was not a victory. It was a model. The next time an armed peasant group organised in a territory without agrarian reform, without judges and without schools, a template would already exist; name, statutes, founding conference, agrarian programme. The Colombian Army, by operating Marquetalia with 16,000 soldiers instead of 16,000 land titles, taught its adversaries that the only institution it recognised was one with the capacity to withstand a military encirclement. It was an involuntary pedagogy that took decades to be acknowledged as such, and longer still to be disproved.
Conclusion
- Agrarian Programme of the Guerrillas, FARC, 1964
- Historical Commission on the Conflict and its Victims, Contribution to understanding the armed conflict in Colombia, 2015
- Truth Commission, There is a future if there is truth, 2022
- Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny Meertens, *Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos* (El Áncora Editores, 1983)
- Marco Palacios, *Entre la legitimidad y la violencia. Colombia 1875-1994* (Norma, 1995)
- National Centre for Historical Memory, The origin of the FARC-EP
- Verdad Abierta, Marquetalia: the founding myth of the FARC
Updated June 13, 2026
