page_title: 19th of April Movement
section_title: Demobilization and participation in politics
hierarchical_section_title: 19th of April Movement / Demobilization and participation in politics
context_page_description: The 19th of April Movement, or M-19, was a Colombian guerrilla organisation movement. After its demobilization it became a political party, the M-19 Democratic Alliance, or AD/M-19.
  The M-19 traced its origins to the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections of 19 April 1970. In those elections, the National Popular Alliance of former military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was denied an electoral victory.
  The ideology of the M-19 was nationalism, but its main aim was to open up democracy in Colombia. It was inspired by other South American urban guerrilla groups, such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina.
  By mid-1985, when the number of active members was estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000, the M-19 was the second largest guerrilla group in Colombia after the FARC. On 27 June 2017, FARC ceased to be an armed group, disarming itself and handing over its weapons to the United Nations.
context_section_description: Internationally isolated, M-19 saw itself unable to continue the armed struggle: As late as 1988, an attempt was made to solicit weapons shipments from Socialist East Germany, but, following reservations from the Ministry of National Defense, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry for State Security, the request was denied in the end. The M-19 eventually gave up its weapons, received pardons and became a political party in the late 1980s, the M-19 Democratic Alliance ("Alianza Democrática M-19", or (AD/M-19)), which renounced the armed struggle. Eventually the M-19 returned Bolívar's sword as a symbol of its demobilization and desire to change society through its participation in legal politics.
  In 1990, one of its more prominent figures, presidential candidate and former guerrilla commander Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, while aboard an airline flight, was murdered by assassins, supposedly on the orders of drug cartel and paramilitary leaders (disappeared AUC commander Carlos Castaño publicly admitted his own responsibility for the murder in a 2002 book and interviews). Some of its other members were also subject to multiple threats or likewise murdered. Antonio Navarro Wolff replaced the deceased Pizarro as candidate and leader of the party, finishing third in that year's presidential race.
  Despite the continuation of smaller scale violence against it, the AD/M-19 survived through the 1990s, achieved favorable electoral results on a local level and actively participated as a high-profile political force in the forging of Colombia's modern 1991 constitution, which replaced a conservative document ostensibly dating from 1886. Antonio Navarro was one of the three co-presidents of the Constituent Assembly of Colombia, together with representatives from the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Conservative Party.
  Several analysts consider that the AD/M-19 reached its peak at this point in time and, while never disappearing completely from the political background, it began to gradually decline as a party on its own, although many of its ex-members have gained influence in the Independent Democratic Pole coalition.
caption: New banner adopted by the Democratic Alliance M-19.
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