wars, reform, repression, insurgencies, foreign (particularly American) intervention, and persistent power competition between reformist liberal and conservative visions of civil society.
A constitution ratified in 1886 under conservative rule ostensibly functions as the rule of law in present-day Colombia. However, as a practical matter, the constitution has repeatedly been put into the background. Stable, if anti-reform conservative, government seemed possible after World War II, until the assassination in 1948 of a liberal-party candidate, Gaitan, for president and the creation of anti-liberal peasant death squads. For the next ten years, Colombia was marked by La Violencia, the name given to the period in which leftist guerrilla factions, military elites, conservatives, moderate conservatives, and liberals competed for power, leaving many assassinations and rights suppressions in the wake. The creation of the National Front by a military junta in 1957-58 led to a remission of La Violencia, plus liberal and moderate-conservative power sharing and limited economic and land reform related to access to production and export of Colombia's all-important coffee crop. But a legacy of quasi-feudal land distribution, repression of dissent and suppression of reform by both liberal and conservative governments, complicated by widespread government corruption and uncertain coffee-production cycles, fostered proliferation of social and labor protest, insurgency, and bandit guerrilla groups--i.e., another complex cycle of La Violencia, which lasted until the National Front suppressed it by 1966. But by the early 1980s, the limits of social and economic reform fostered old rivalries--by this time complicated by the emergence of the drug trade as a major factor of Colombia's economy by the early 1980s, resulting in polarization at the extremes and ready recourse to violence by extremists targeting both oth
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