Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in the context of Bogotazo

The Colombian conflict (Spanish: Conflicto armado interno de Colombia, lit. 'Colombian internal armed conflict') began on May 27, 1964, and is a low-intensity asymmetric war between the government of Colombia, far-right paramilitary groups, crime syndicates and far-left guerrilla groups fighting each other to increase their influence in Colombian territory. Some of the most important international contributors to the Colombian conflict include multinational corporations, the United States, Cuba, and the drug trafficking industry.

The conflict is historically rooted in the conflict known as La Violencia, which was triggered by the 1948 assassination of liberal political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and in the aftermath of the anti-communist repression in rural Colombia in the 1960s that led Liberal and Communist militants to re-organize into the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

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.

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.