Atrocious assassins in the violence novel from Valle del Cauca

Abstract

The methods in which crime developed during la Violence in Colombia reached unprecedented levels of cruelty in the country. Shortly after the Conservative Party came to power in 1946, broad sectors of it sought to expand their diminished political bases through the physical and moral destruction of liberalism. In Valle del Cauca, some conservative leaders constituted and financed gangs of murderers who, in association with policemen and detectives, undertook conservative homogenization campaigns through both selective assassinations and massacres commited in various places. Many of these assassins committed their crimes with extreme levels of sadism and inhumanity, executing opprobrious practices on the victims. Thus, the atrocity became a fundamental characteristic of said violence and a matter of special relevance for the literature that dealt with this phenomenon. In this paper I will examine the types of murderers, the methods of crime and the literary treatment of cruelty in three novels from Valle del Cauca that ficitionalize the criminal campaign of the Conservative Party in Valle del Cauca: Viento seco (1953), Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1972) y Noche de pájaros (1984).