Summary Of La Violencia By Doris Salcedo

In Noviembre 6 y 7, Doris Salcedo portrayed a violent event in Colombian history; an attack on the Palace of Justice by M-19 guerrilla forces and counter-attack by the government which lasted 2 days and produced more than 100 deaths. Salcedo developed the piece in 2002, on the 17th anniversary of the event (Sanchez 82) in order to get the public to remember the tragedy. The piece consists on hundreds of chairs, slowly being lowered down from the new Palace of Justice’s roof. Moreover, the large number of chairs hanging from the building’s façade conveys the scale of the massacre that had occurred 17 years earlier (Mengham 10). As can be seen in Images 5 and 6, the chairs, cluttered together, provide a sense of disarray and confusion, which illustrates the general chaotic atmosphere present during the initial siege.

However, despite the chaos

This conception of Colombia as a violent space started in the period between 1945 and 1965. This time period is called “La violencia” – the violence – and is characterized by continuous armed conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties, which centered on political and economical issues (Roldan 10). Most of “La violencia” occurred in the countryside, where small farmers were persecuted both by the Conservative government through state apparatuses and by large landowners. Thus, rather than being exclusively political, the conflict was also fostered by economic interests, since the large landowners wanted to take back the land that had been given to small farmers as a result of President Alfonso López Pumarejo program “Revolucion en Marcha,” instated in 1936 (Roldan 16). Liberal farmers responded to this conservative aggression through the formation of “Autodefensas,” self-defense groups, that quickly parted from liberalism, identified themselves with communist ideals (Aguilera Peña 35-39), and later organized themselves into leftist guerrilla