History of Villavicencio

The Llaneros, the inhabitants of the plains,are fierce horsemen who first fought for the Spanish royalists and then for the Venezuelan and Colombian rebels during the war of Independence. By crossing the Cordillera Oriental with Bolívar, they surprised the royalist army on the plains of Boyaca on the 6th of August, 1819Tunja and cleared the way for the taking of an abandoned Santa Fe de Bogotá one week later. In the 1840s, some farmers from Caqueza, a town on the eastern folds of Bogotá started the modest settlement of Gramalote, which officially became the parish of Villavicencio in 1855. The parish was named for Antonio Villavicencio, a patriot in the Colombian war of independence. Vaccines, a mule road, and the availability of vast areas of free land, drove new colonizers to continue the settlement of Villavicencio. As the roads improved the access to the Llanos, the farmers could send their produce and cattle to the markets of Bogotá.

After the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular Liberal politician in 1948, the large landowners saw a pretext to drive farmers out of their lands. The Llaneros resisted by driving the army out of population centers. The guerrillas never took Villavicencio, but they brought the fighting to the military base of Apiay. As the fighting between the government and the Llanero guerrillas was out of control, a military coup in June 1953, took Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power who immediately negotiated a cease fire and amnesty for the insurgents.

1948-present

Since 1948 when a period of violence erupted against countryside farmers, thousands of people who had been displaced by wealthy