6 de septiembre de 1952: el fracaso de un pacto bipartidista en Colombia

This article examines the political conflict between Colombia’s liberal and conservative elites surrounding the so-called Pacto de Octubre of 1951, with the aim of contextualizing the attacks of September 6, 1952, within the period known as La Violencia. Methodologically, the study analyzes the partisan press of the early 1950s to identify the discursive strategies employed by both liberals and conservatives to define their political adversary and to conceal their internal divisions while constructing journalistic interpretations of the political context of the time. The article proposes that the political attack of September 6, 1952, resulted from the failure of party leaderships to consolidate an exclusive and exclusionary dialogue between the elites of both parties, a process through which the Liberal Party lost political influence and the Conservative Party proved unable to conceal the deep crisis that preceded the collapse of its hegemony.