A family’s story illuminates Colombia’s ‘La Violencia’ in Adriana E. Ramírez’s The Violence

Colombians do not reach for euphemism when they describe their darkest decade. They call the years from 1948 to 1958 what they were: La Violencia. In her engaging new book, The Violence, Adriana E. Ramírez revisits that period through the most intimate lens available to her—her own family—and finds a way to make national history both lucid and deeply human.

The conflict ignited with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal frontrunner in the 1949 presidential race. By that evening, the assassin and thousands more were dead. What followed was a purely political war—Conservative versus Liberal—where affiliation, your own or your employer’s, could determine survival.

The killing, Ramírez writes, was designed to terrorize and was “as sporadic as it was planned, as orchestrated as it was randomized.” Hundreds of thousands of Colombians were killed and countless others were uprooted before the two parties forged a power-sharing pact, the National Front, which alternated the presidency until 1974.

Ramírez structures the book as a biography of her maternal grandmother, Esther Angarita de Rueda. When the violence begins, Esther is a 20-year-old who wants nothing more than to remain her dairy farmer father’s right hand on the family’s largest finca in the mountainous Santander region north of Bogotá.

The Angaritas’ Liberal politics, however, force a series of moves—from the city of Socorro to the Caribbean port of Barranquilla. Esther is pushed into roles she did not initially seek: as the wife of a politically ambitious husband, then as the mother of seven children—five in five years—and, by 45, as a widow, a label she dislikes but has carried since.

Threaded through Esther’s life are two figures who would reshape Colombia. Pedro Marín emerges from the 1949 massacre of Ceilán—where Conservatives killed and mutilated more than three-quarters of the town’s residents—as one of the few survivors. At 18, he forms the People’s Army, which later becomes the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, after a Colombian and US raid on the group’s training camp in 1964.

Pablo Escobar, meanwhile, roots his origin story in La Violencia, recounting that his parents’ village was burned two weeks before his birth.

He grows up in the comunas of Medellín and becomes one of the world’s wealthiest men through the coca plant—sacred to the Muisca long before it became, as Ramírez writes, “a party favor for the decadent Yankees.” After La Violencia, the country’s bloodshed becomes harder to parse, with paramilitary bands, guerrillas, and state forces vying for control even before drug cartels surge in the 1970s.

Ramírez keeps the narrative tight by following a handful of central actors and the fortunes of her own family, rendering grim material novelistic, edifying, and consistently readable. The result is a portrait of how a decade of political slaughter reverberated through households and across generations—and how its aftershocks shaped the Colombia that followed.