The atrocities that were committed at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 were seen by both sides as a possible precedent for Colombia, causing both sides to fear that it could also happen in their country; this belief also spurred the credibility of the conspiracies and it also served as a rationale for violence. anticlerical violence in the Republican zones in Spain in the first months of that war when anarchists, left-wing socialists and independent communists burned churches and murdered nearly 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns, and used this to justify their own mass killings of Jews, Masons, and socialists.
