Colombian Guerrilla War Begins.

By 1976, the war in Colombia had been going on for more than twenty-five years. The conflict started in 1948, after the Conservative Party government carried out a massacre of Liberal Party supporters. This part of the war, known as La Violencia, continued for ten years and included an army coup orchestrated by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. In 1958, the leadership of the Liberal and Conservative parties reached an agreement to share the responsibility of governing the country, alternating power every national election cycle. This was known as the National Front. This agreement left most of Colombia’s working class and peasantry out of the political process, which prompted politically minded members of the working class to resort to armed struggle.