Colombian presidential election, 1949 in the context of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán


Colombian presidential election, 1949 in the context of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

⭐ Core Definition: Colombian presidential election, 1949

Presidential elections were held in Colombia on 27 November 1949. The result was a victory for Laureano Gómez of the Conservative Party, who received all but 23 of the 1.1 million valid votes cast. The opposition Liberal Party withdrew from the election and called for a boycott after their candidate Darío Echandía was the victim of a failed assassination attempt.

It is widely speculated that Jorge Eliécer Gaitán would likely have been elected President had he not been assassinated on 9 April 1948. This assassination occurred immediately prior to the armed insurrection or Bogotazo.

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Colombian presidential election, 1949 in the context of La Violencia

La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, mainly fought in the countryside.

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. His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting, which lasted ten hours and resulted in around 5,000 casualties. An alternative historiography proposes the Conservative Party's return to power following the election of 1946 to be the cause. Rural town police and political leaders encouraged Conservative-supporting peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-supporting peasants, which provoked peasant-to-peasant violence throughout Colombia.

View the full Wikipedia page for La Violencia
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