La Violencia

La Violencia is the period of political violence that Tirofio identifies as the beginning of his fighting life in 1948. His recollection gives the period a personal scale: political allegiance enters the life of a woodcutter who had considered left- and right-wing labels irrelevant, then becomes inseparable from the loss of his neighbors, friends, and family.

Tirofio’s Account of 1948

Tirofio recalls that he was living in a small village and working as a woodcutter when a local right-wing militia rounded up the village men and killed them; the attackers also sexually assaulted women and girls in the community. Tirofio had been working in the hills and returned to find that his neighbors, friends, and family had been killed.

The attack, as Tirofio explains it, was retaliation for the villagers allowing a left-wing group to dig a well. He had not regarded himself as belonging to either political side: his concern had been the work of cutting wood. The militia’s violence made that supposed neutrality untenable, turning an ordinary act of community cooperation into the grounds for collective punishment.

From Loss to Political Commitment

After finding the dead, Tirofio went back into the hills and joined the guerrillas. His account presents that decision not as the culmination of a prior ideological commitment, but as a consequence of violence against people close to him. Political identity arrives through bereavement and the need to choose a side in a conflict that has already entered his home.

Tirofio tells this history to make a broader point about political indifference: people may claim to have no politics, he argues, but the killing of friends and family can make that position impossible to sustain. La Violencia therefore functions in his recollection both as a historical designation and as a rupture in an individual life—the moment when private loss becomes participation in armed struggle.

Narrative Significance

The episode explains Tirofio’s path into guerrilla fighting through the immediate circumstances he remembers, rather than through an abstract account of ideology. The village well links a practical local need to the wider left-right conflict, while the militia’s retaliation shows how political divisions can make a community’s everyday choices dangerous. His testimony gives the period’s violence a human cause-and-consequence structure: a man who had thought politics did not matter joins the guerrillas after violence destroys that distance.