The question that opens this series is not why the guerrilla arose in Colombia. The right question is why it took so long. A century of peasant demands answered with fire, of reforms announced and then dismantled, of legal avenues opened and closed by those who administered them. What happened in 1964 in the mountains of Tolima was not an ideological accident or the result of a communist plot. It was the accumulated consequence of a structure that left no other way out.
I. The land that never belonged to those who worked it
Colombia was born as a republic with a colonial inheritance that nobody proposed to dismantle. The large stretches of land concentrated in the hands of families of Spanish origin, the Church and the creoles who had negotiated their loyalty during independence, reproduced throughout the nineteenth century without any liberal or conservative government seriously considering their redistribution. The civil wars of the nineteenth century, seven at national scale plus the War of a Thousand Days between 1899 and 1902, did not alter the geography of property. They reorganised political power among elites, but left intact the agrarian structure upon which that power rested.
The figures that the twentieth century inherited from that process are brutal in their stability. 0.1 per cent of properties of more than two thousand hectares concentrated 60 per cent of cultivable land. 53 per cent of families engaged in agriculture possessed no land. 70 per cent of lands put into production occupied only 5 per cent of the country’s productive area. These are not abstract figures; they describe a system in which most of the rural population existed in a relationship of structural dependence on a minority of landowners who set wages, controlled access to credit and determined the living conditions of those who worked their land.
The first serious attempt to reform that reality came in 1936, under the government of Alfonso López Pumarejo. Law 200, part of what his government called the Revolution in March, established the extinction of ownership rights over unexploited land after ten years, recognised the social function of property and sought to formalise the situation of settlers and sharecroppers. It was a moderate reform in its ambitions, but threatening enough for the landowning class to trigger a campaign of systematic sabotage. Landowners expelled settlers and tenants before the law was applied, reducing the number of potential beneficiaries. The deadlines for extinction of ownership were met without the State having the capacity or will to enforce them. Eight years later, López Pumarejo himself, in his second term, signed Law 100 of 1944, which declared the exploitation of land through sharecropping contracts to be desirable and extended to fifteen years the deadline for extinction of ownership. It was the counter-reform disguised as a technical complement. The cycle that sequence inaugurated, reform announced, oligarchic resistance, silent reversal, would repeat itself with minor variations throughout the rest of the century.
II. The United Fruit and the grammar of punishment
In the far north of the country, on the Magdalena coast, the United Fruit Company had spent three decades demonstrating that the Colombian State was capable of acting effectively when the interests it was supposed to protect were the right ones. The American company had arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and by 1928 controlled 89,000 hectares of Colombian land, along with the railways, irrigation canals, shipping ports and communication systems of the region. It was an enclave in the precise sense of the term, a territory within the territory where the rules of the Colombian State applied selectively and where the company set wages, administered provision stores and paid its workers in credit vouchers instead of money.
The banana workers had gone on strike in 1910, 1918 and 1924. Each time, the conflict was resolved with partial promises and enough repression to restore the company’s operation. In October 1928, delegates from fifteen unions representing workers, settlers, labourers and peasants presented a list of demands signed by thousands of workers. The demands were elementary: wage increases, six-day working weeks, hygienic dormitories, direct contract with the company without intermediaries, compensation for work accidents, improved medical services and elimination of the payment-in-vouchers system. The United Fruit Company refused to negotiate. In November, the workers went on strike.
The government of conservative president Miguel Abadía Méndez sent 700 soldiers under the command of General Carlos Cortés Vargas. In the afternoon of 5 December, the strikers waiting in the square of the Ciénaga station for the arrival of a government official who never appeared received the order to disperse. At midnight on 6 December, the army opened fire. The number of dead is still disputed today. The Colombian government officially acknowledged nine victims. In January 1929, a cable from the United States embassy in Bogotá addressed to the Secretary of State in Washington reported that the total number of strikers killed by Colombian troops exceeded one thousand. The Commission for Truth, in its work published decades later, found in its own archives a letter from the United Fruit Company mentioning the number of dead, though the document has never been reproduced in its entirety.
What matters about the episode is not the exact figure. What matters is the political lesson it left, clear, without ambiguity. When workers at an American company threatened production, the Colombian State mobilised its army to defend the company’s interests. That mechanism required no explicit formulation. It was inscribed in institutional practice and remained available to be invoked whenever necessary. Twenty-three years later, a young liberal lawyer named Jorge Eliécer Gaitán presented to Congress a documented report on the massacre. His investigation contributed to his political career. And in 1948, his assassination would show that the lesson of 1928 had not changed its meaning.
III. The Bogotazo and the closure of the electoral route
Gaitán was the most dangerous politician Colombia had produced in decades, dangerous not because he was radical in his proposals, which he was not, but because he had managed to articulate a massive electoral base that crossed class lines without ignoring them. He was a man of popular origin, son of a second-hand bookseller from Bogotá, who had obtained his doctorate in Rome studying criminology under Enrico Ferri and had returned to practise law in defence of causes that elite lawyers would not accept. His political project was reformist liberalism, redistribution within the system, not its collapse. But his ability to mobilise the sectors that the traditional two-party system administered without representing them made him a systemic threat.
On 9 April 1948, at 13:05, as he left his office for lunch, a man shot him three times in the street. Gaitán died instantly. The assassin, Juan Roa Sierra, was lynched by the crowd before he could be questioned. The shock transformed Bogotá into a battlefield within hours, and the uprising spread across the country within days. The Bogotazo left at least 3,500 dead in the capital in the first week. State facilities, radio stations, government buildings, elite businesses burned in cities throughout the country.
What the Bogotazo meant politically goes far beyond its dimension of violence. The candidate most likely to win the 1949 presidential elections had been eliminated at the moment he represented the concrete possibility of accessing power through the legal route. This does not necessarily mean his assassination was a State conspiracy, a hypothesis that was never proven. It means something more structural: that the Colombian political system demonstrated, regardless of who pulled the trigger, that it was not prepared to tolerate a real redistribution of power. The electoral route was closed not by decree but by the accomplished fact.
IV. La Violencia, ten years that reorganised the human geography
What followed the Bogotazo has a name in Colombian historiography, simply La Violencia, as if the phenomenon were so massive it required no adjective. Between 1948 and 1958, the Colombian countryside lived through an undeclared civil war between liberal and conservative factions that had on its surface the appearance of a partisan dispute and at its core the structure of an agrarian conflict. The liberal peasants of Tolima, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca and the Eastern Plains faced armed conservative groups that frequently operated with the complicity or direct support of the Police.
The death toll is subject to academic debate. The most rigorous estimate from a demographic standpoint, produced by researchers at the Bank of the Republic from records of the period, calculates between 57,000 and 113,000 fatalities for the extended period 1949-1966. The figures commonly cited in Colombian historiography range between 200,000 and 300,000 dead. The distance between the two estimates is itself revealing. The conflict was so poorly documented, so geographically dispersed, so permeated by institutional impunity, that there is no consensus on its actual scale half a century later. What no source disputes is that forced displacement was massive, that tens of thousands of peasant families lost their land, and that the concentration of rural property worsened as a direct result of the violence.
The National Front of 1957 formally ended the bipartisan confrontation through an agreement between the elites of the two parties to alternate in power for sixteen years and install mandatory parity in all State positions. It was a peace pact between the ruling sectors that, at the same time, structurally closed the political system to any force other than liberal or conservative. What was presented as a solution to violence was also the institutionalisation of exclusion. Movements arising outside the two-party system, regardless of their ideological orientation, would have no legal space for representation until 1991. The implication for organised peasants was direct and without exit.
V. The peasant self-defences, defence as the first form of armed organisation
In the hardest years of La Violencia, some peasant communities in Tolima and other regions found in collective armed organisation the only way to survive. The case of El Davis is paradigmatic. At the beginning of 1950, around 400 peasant families concentrated in that territory to defend themselves from the attacks of the Police and conservative armed civilian groups. It was a civilian population protected by militias equipped with shotguns and improvised weapons who had adopted a basic coexistence regulation and defence norms. Among those who participated in these first structures was a liberal peasant from the Quindío named Pedro Antonio Marín, who would later be known as Manuel Marulanda Vélez or Tirofijo.
The Colombian Communist Party, which had developed since its Sixth Congress of 1949 a strategy of combining all forms of struggle, found in those self-defence communities an organisational base. While its urban structures worked in unions and student organisations, its rural cadres helped to articulate the dispersed peasant militias. The amnesty offered by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla after his 1953 coup allowed a partial demobilisation. Marulanda accepted it and was appointed inspector of a road in the Planadas region. He did not hand over the weapons. The assassination of communist leader Jacobo Prías Alape, Charro Negro, in January 1960, despite his also having accepted the amnesty, closed the parenthesis. Marulanda returned to the mountains.
VI. Marquetalia, when the anticommunist doctrine found its Colombian laboratory
In October 1961, conservative senator Álvaro Gómez Hurtado denounced before the Congress of the Republic the existence of what he called Independent Republics, territories in Tolima, Cauca, Caquetá and the Llanos where State authority was null and where peasant communities organised under communist direction operated. The speech had an internal rhetorical function, but described a reality that the government found intolerable not so much because of its actual scale, which was small, but because of its symbolic significance in the context of the Cold War.
Washington observed Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 with a renewed paranoia. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was the friendly face of a policy that had a less presentable operational face. The National Security Doctrine, elaborated by the Pentagon, redefined the role of Latin American armies as internal counter-insurgency forces rather than defences against external threats. Plan LASO, Latin American Security Operation, was the Colombian instrument of that doctrine. It provided military advice, equipment and conceptual framework for operations against the peasant enclaves.
On 18 May 1964, President Guillermo León Valencia ordered Operation Sovereignty against Marquetalia. Valencia was the second president of the National Front, grandson of the conservative poet Guillermo Valencia and son of one of the most deeply rooted families in the Cauca, that class which in Colombia has administered power for centuries without needing to explain itself. He is also the paternal grandfather of Paloma Valencia Laserna, presidential candidate of Centro Democrático in the 2026 elections, central figure of the opposition to the peace process with the FARC and to the government of Gustavo Petro. The fact is not a biographical accident. It is the most precise illustration available of how continuity works in Colombia: the grandfather creates the FARC in 1964 by refusing agrarian reform and responding with bombers to a peasant demand, the granddaughter opposes sixty years later the agreement that tried to close what those bombs opened. The family did not change its position. Neither did the conflict.
Sixteen thousand soldiers, backed by bomber aircraft and helicopters, and according to testimonies and journalistic records of the period with the use of napalm and chemical agents, were deployed against a territory where a few hundred armed peasants lived under Marulanda’s command. The operation took the territory. It did not destroy the resistance. The survivors dispersed to other regions and in June 1964 formalised their transformation from self-defence to mobile guerrilla with the adoption of a Guerrilla Agrarian Programme whose first point was revolutionary agrarian reform. In 1965, the First Guerrilla Conference consolidated the structure that would be known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
The Colombian State responded to the demand for land with 16,000 soldiers and bombers. Not with agrarian reform. That choice was neither accidental nor purely reactive. It was the repetition, on a larger scale and with imported doctrine, of the same mechanism that had worked in Ciénaga in 1928. Peasant protest always encountered the same institutional response because the alternative would have required redistributing what those who controlled the State were not prepared to concede.
Conclusion
The Colombian guerrilla was not born of a conspiracy or the importation of a foreign model. It was born of the accumulation of responses to demands that the political system decided not to process. Every frustrated agrarian reform, every massacred strike, every eliminated candidate, every bombed community left a residue that did not disappear with the end of the episode. That residue organised itself, found cadres, adopted doctrine, and produced the next turn of the cycle. The long fire was not lit by any single actor. It was fed, patiently, by those who refused to extinguish it with the only tools that would have worked.
The next episode will examine how that same mechanism produced, in parallel and with distinct logics, the other two major insurgent organisations of the nineteen-sixties, the ELN and the M-19…
By Gabriel Schwarb
