The present investigation is based on the murder of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala on 9 April 1948, whose event marked the second half of the twentieth century in Colombia and continues to have a significant impact on the country’s political and social strength. However, despite the documentary history of this historical fact, which has been traced in this thesis, the political uses of this death are the analytical perspective chosen, since it represents another research look that has not been worked on. Even, our study is much more accurate in terms of the dynamics, strategies and mechanisms that demonstrate the uses of that past in official and opposition terms as an attempt at a more supportive policy specifically in the period from 1948 to 1953. Moreover, the body of thesis shows how the violent acts which accompanied his death, subsequently named as the Bogotazo, played to the detriment of his figure and legacy. However, they continue to hold Gaitan into force, activating a series of symbolic strategies of proxy controversy, as well as making it meaningful to this episode, making it the nerve centre of the dispute over the past and the meanings of violence in Colombia. The political uses of this death are thus developed in four chapters, the first as a historiographic passage; the following three chapters work on the post-mortem behaviour of the multitude, political parties, their family, the press, among others. Finally, a mystery of commemorations is found in the attempt to connect past and present, given that since 2012 in Juan Manuel Santos’s government on 9 April it has been used as a commemorative date to legitimise the peace process between the FARC and the country’s oldest guerrilla guerrilla, thus continuing the different senses and disputes in the past. Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences