Someone Known but Whom I don’t Want to Remember, Violence

In general, Latin American countries have been victims of continuous aberrations throughout their history; genocide, coup d'état, killings and terror. Colombia is not the exception. Violence has covered Colombian lands with blood for a long time. Nora goes back to the first great tremor that she witnessed. She was just 6 years old, it was April 9, 1947 and a murder would mark the destiny of the country and the beginning of the era known as "La Violencia." The unclarified homicide of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán marks, according to many historians, the beginning of unforeseen terror in contemporary Colombia. Fear takes the streets. Many murders, a lot of disaster, says Nora.

The people wanted that man. They killed him so he would not get to be the president. That was terrible. Basically, those years were appalling in Colombia, a lot of murder, a lot of disaster. After that we had a president named Laureano Gómez. He made a slaughterhouse of people in heaps. The dead rate of the towns went out of control, there was no place to put the bodies. They killed too many people. They killed them for politics, they were conservatives and they did not like the liberals. Since those years there has been a lot of war in Colombia. That's where everything started. Since the death of Gaitán, from there to here there has been a lot of killings. The conservatives went to the houses to kill, directly, it was frightening, people killed for pleasure.

Since we were small children, my brother and I went everywhere. We heard people saying; "There are so many dead in such and such town", and we went there. We hid and watched as all those corpses arriving. That was awful, sometimes I do not want to remember that.

 It is thought that Gaitán would be elected president of Colombia in the elections that were expected to take place in 1950. He, despite expressing an open repudiation of communist governments, showed a clear inclination towards socialism, something that in those years, in the middle of the Cold War, was a dangerous thing to the eyes of the monarchs of the world. (We are not going to say here that we know for sure who intervened so that Gaitán would not compete for the presidency of Colombia because we do not know for sure, but we can all think of someone who has been an expert in the manipulating the rights of the free peoples of the world.)

 As a result of this assassination, the town rioted in protests and demonstrations, one of them known as the Bogotazo, which is identified as a wave of protests throughout the country that began in Bogotá. The period known as "La Violencia," which for some people lasted between 1947 and 1958 and left more than 300,000 dead of the 11 million Colombians of back then, began with the Bogotazo. The outcome was brutal, an armed conflict that included the military, guerrilla groups, paramilitaries and later, drug cartels.