Where does political violence come from, and what has been the position of historians be- fore it? This article contributes to said in- vestigation, placing back together the way in which liberals founded an insurmountable hostility regarding the conservatives, which led them to see war as the only way to recover their predominance in the political arena and to undo the regeneration work. We carry out a detailed reconstruction of the attitude and the political notions underlying the actions of the liberals that allowed the most impatient of the group to impose over the rest of the par- ty. Based on the aforementioned, we outline an interpretation of the violent answers that arose in the Colombian political scene. This outline, instead of conceding to fatalism, deals with understanding the conflict in the frame of democracy, where pluralism is both a cha- racteristic and an issue.